By Beth Pollak
In college, eight out of ten students are sitting pretty as far as healthcare is concerned. Mom and Dad (and their health insurance) pay any medical bills that may come up.
After graduation, you get dropped from their insurance plan, but no worries. You are healthy and in the prime of your life – why bother with health insurance?
And who cares about the new healthcare reform proposals being debated in Washington and around the country? Not you. It will not really affect you, right?
Wrong. The healthcare debate has huge ramifications for college students, new graduates and other young adults. And it is not just a recent problem.
“Healthcare reform is not new,” said Dr. Richard Schuster, a professor of health policy and management in the College of Public Health. “It’s been a part of active discussion for about 100 years.”
Even so, new issues and ideas have been proposed within the past year. Since healthcare affects everyone, students should stay updated on the news, and know what aspects may change for them.
Currently, college students can stay on their parents’ health insurance plan until they graduate. Proposals floating around Congress provide a way for young people to remain on their parents’ plan until they are older, even after graduation.
This provision would allow students to have more flexibility in choosing a first post-graduation job, or the opportunity to pursue other avenues before going into a job that provides benefits.
A public option would also give students more options when choosing jobs. Public option is a government-run insurance plan that may be able to offer lower rates than private insurers.
Angie Fertig, assistant professor in the College of Public Health, provided a hypothetical dilemma for a new graduate. The grad has the opportunity to join a hip start-up company with no benefits or a stodgy, boring job with benefits.
Today, the student likely would have to choose the job with benefits in order to get affordable health insurance. With a public option, “the two [job] options would be more even to you because the decision wouldn’t be tied to benefits,” said Fertig, who is also a public service assistant in the Carl Vinson Institute of Government.
Some young adults choose to go without insurance regardless of its availability.
“College students may feel that they’re invincible, but they can be shocked by catastrophic events,” said Dr. Mark Ebell, associate professor in the College of Public Health.
Under the proposed plans, an individual mandate is in the works. That would require all Americans to buy health insurance or face penalties.
“Students going to school without health insurance would be helped by an individual mandate because they are engaging in very risky behavior,” said Lance Palmer, Ph.D, professor in the Family Financial Planning department.
Palmer suggested finding an insurance plan with a high deductible for students who are wary of paying for health insurance benefits that they may not use.
High deductible means that the out-of-pocket costs for the insured would be high, generally upwards of $1000. The premiums, however, are often less than half the cost of a typical health plan. This allows healthy students to have insurance for catastrophic health events, but still make a low monthly payment.
“Those who choose to be uninsured [now] will be unhappy because they will be subsidizing those who are sick,” Fertig said of an individual mandate.
Regardless of how the healthcare debate plays out and affects young adults, there still will be problems, and people will be unhappy.
“Healthcare is always characterized as being in crisis,” Schuster said.
Edited by Jon-Michael Sullivan
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Lots of good information here, but it takes awhile (and an editorial admonishment) to get to it. After you wag your finger at your readers and tell them to pay attention, you finally give them some incentive to do so.
ReplyDeleteHealth care is a huge issue, so one can't expect the proposals in Congress to be thoroughly explained in a single 600-word story, but it's important to provide a clearer summary of the overriding aims of the most popular bills. The piecemeal rolling out of the public option, the individual mandate, etc., leaves readers with an incoherent picture of the overall plans. The political context of these plans also can't be ignored: These are Democratic proposals that have been severely criticized by Republican opponents. The valid criticisms (cost concerns, bureaucracy and access issues, defense of the free market, etc.) are entitled to a fair hearing.
If this all seems like too tall an order for a story of this length and complexity, perhaps it is. It might be easier to bite off a smaller chunk of this story and explore it in greater detail than to try to capture the whole thing at once.