Keeping Kids on their Parents’ Health Plan
What difference does it make?
” ‘Aging out’ [becoming too old to be covered on your parents’ health plan] results in an abrupt 5 to 8 percentage point reduction in the probability of having health insurance,”… And “not having insurance leads to a 40% increase in emergency-department visits and a 61% reduction in inpatient hospital admissions.”
Full article on health care for young adults, one of the biggest groups of the uninsured.
Yes, but the numbers are still small. Very few people have a problem.
I suspect that a 25 or 26 year old can get cheaper coverage on his own than the cost of adding him to a parent’s plan.
I agree with Tom. Twnty-year-olds are really cheap to insure — comparatively speaking.
The primary reason many young adults lack health coverage is that many simply aren’t willing to purchase a policy they expect to get little use from. They certainly don’t want to pay $50 to $100 per month for a high-deductible plan they don’t expect to use. Neither are they willing to part with $300 per month for a low-deductible plan when they only expect to see a doctor once or twice during the year.
It’s not uncommon to hear hard-luck stories in the news about young adults who took a chance and needed care. Yet we rarely hear about the other 99.99% who took a chance and came out ahead. I was one of those young adults (while in graduate school), who was uninsured and paid for medical care out-of-pocket. When I began working for the university (which included comprehensive health coverage) I thought it was such a waste of money.
Also, the way this post is worded, it makes it sound like the effects are large. In fact this is a very healthy age group — they rarely go in a hospital.