Spring is crunch time for college students. Final exams, 20 page papers, coffee runs at odd hours, and late nights (or early mornings, depending on your perspective) in the library. For seniors, spring also means the end of being on your parents' or your student health policy. I remember my own worries about that last year at this time. Health reform is changing that. By September, young adults up to age 26 will be able to stay on their family policies.
For UnitedHealth Group, crunch time isn't next September. It's now, reports the Wall Street Journal. Regulators and insurers are still working out the details and strategies for covering young adults, but UnitedHealth wants to avoid a coverage gap between graduation and September by allowing college graduates currently covered in an employer-sponsored family plan to stay on it. (Neither the newspaper article nor the company news release shed much light on what it may cost to extend the coverage.) (We should note that the current lack of strict regulatory guidance makes the age of 26 deadline slightly uncertain -- it could be your 26th birthday exactly, or coverage might extend further, depending on the tax year.)
The WSJ estimates that UnitedHealth's move will extend coverage for about 150,000 young adults. According to UnitedHealth, family plans offered on the individual market already have the option of maintaining coverage for dependant children up to 26. In a press release, UnitedHealth President Gail Boudreaux said,
We want students to graduate into a secure future, not the ranks of the uninsured, so we are working with employers to make sure these young adults have health coverage available to them ahead of the new requirements ... Accelerating the dependent coverage extension timeline for our graduating student enrollees is another tangible step we are taking to help translate the new, complex health reform directives into workable reality.
While some students might argue that a good old-fashioned, finish everything at the last minute “all-nighter” is the best way to get your assignment done before the deadline, some prefer to get ahead. (We won’t reveal which strategy we preferred in college…) Implementation is a long hard road. We hope insurers, as UnitedHealth is doing in this context, decide to move ahead swiftly and constructively.
And if you are planning on pulling an all-nighter, stay away from the energy drinks. Trust us.
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