Dallas ? Clint Bowers had always been in perfect health.

So when the 24-year-old Baylor graduate was dropped from his family’s insurance plan and couldn’t land a job with health benefits, he took a gamble.

He did without.

Then four months ago, Bowers got the shock of his life. Suffering from a fever and fatigue, he went to see his doctor. The diagnosis: leukemia.

“This is something you can’t ever believe would happen to you,” said Bowers, who went through three months of treatment before finding a way to get coverage. “I hadn’t ever been sick in my life, and while I’m uninsured, I get hit with this.”

In the United States, the number of people between the ages of 18 and 34 without health coverage has grown to 17.9 million people, accounting for 41 percent of the country’s uninsured. Amid a soft job market and increasing insurance costs, experts fear that more people in this age bracket will forgo medical care.

“The facts are, the younger you are, the less likely you are to have a serious illness or need hospitalization,” said Len Nichols, vice president of the Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington, D.C. “It is in some sense a rational bet, but it’s a gamble, in capital letters.

“Most (young adults), when they consider the costs and what they’ll have to give up, choose not to buy it,” Nichols said. “They’re betting against the probability that a very bad event happens to them.”

Shifting priorities

Sarah Walker, a 23-year-old graduate student at Southern Methodist University, became ineligible for her parents’ insurance when she turned 22. With a part-time job that doesn’t offer benefits and a slew of other expenses, she said health insurance didn’t fit into her budget.

“I’m paying for my education, for rent, for food and for car insurance,” she said. “All that comes before health insurance.”

Sara Collins, senior program officer with the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy foundation in New York, said this age group was high-risk and needed to be insured. Young adults have the highest number of annual visits to emergency rooms and account for one-third of new HIV diagnoses. There are 3.5 million pregnancies among women in their 20s every year.

“It’s a time when you’re becoming an adult, and you need to establish your own connections to the health system,” Collins said. “If you’re losing coverage at this time, it’s very difficult to establish those relationships.”

Cost is key

When it comes to purchasing insurance, the biggest obstacle is cost. Nichols said the price of coverage was rising faster than income, making it difficult for young people to get access to insurance.

The best bet for young adults — second to working for a firm with benefits — is to purchase insurance in the nongroup market, Nichols said. There, healthy people will pay around $150 a month. People with pre-existing ailments could pay up to $10,000 a month for coverage, he said. COBRA, a federal program that enables people to buy insurance from former employers or their parents’ plans, costs around $3,000 a year for an individual and $8,000 for a family, Nichols said. And short-term emergency insurance, which protects only against catastrophic events, ranges in price by state.