Health bill lets graduates remain on parents’ plans

For graduating seniors without immediate plans for employment or further education, the scramble for health insurance is over. The sweeping health care reform bill, which was passed by Congress on March 21 and signed by President Obama on March 23, requires insurance companies to allow children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until they turn 26, as long as their place of employment does not offer coverage.

Though elements of health insurance reform have different implementation dates that stretch until 2018 — the requirement that insurance companies accept customers with preexisting conditions goes into effect in 2014, for example — regulations requiring that insurance plans treat children up to 26 as eligible dependents goes into effect in September, six months after the bill’s signing.

For many seniors, this is a welcome change. Most students interviewed for this article said they are currently covered by their families’ insurance plans.

Meredith Bock ’10 said she plans to take advantage of the change after completing a one-year fellowship with Project 55, which connects graduating seniors and recent graduates with fellowships in the nonprofit sector, at the University of California, San Francisco Breast Care Center.

Bock will have health insurance from Project 55 but said she plans to stay on her mother’s insurance plan when she attends medical school after the fellowship.

Bock added that she thinks the changes might have the biggest impact on “the people who are going straight into the workforce, who might not be making very high pay at first.”

But not all seniors plan to take advantage of the change. Carly Cline ’10 said she would probably pay for her own insurance, citing a desire for independence.

Cline, who plans to teach English in South Korea after graduation, said she will likely be insured while she works there but that she was not sure how she will be insured afterward.

“I’m going to Korea to teach English, so a lot of programs that I’ve applied to [have] told me about their health benefits — but as far as having it [in the United States], I don’t know a lot about that kind of thing,” she said.

The extended coverage, however, will not affect some graduating seniors who have already found jobs offering insurance coverage. Rashad Badr ’10, who won a Scholars in the Nation’s Service fellowship, will be insured for the next four years while he works for the federal government and earns a Master in Public Policy degree from the Wilson School.

“The entire time, for the entirety of the four years, I’ll be considered a Princeton employee, and Princeton will provide me with insurance,” he said.

Jason Anton ’10 said that he was pleased with the extension to family coverage but that he was somewhat critical of the health care reform legislation as a whole.

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“I don’t think it’s a perfect bill by any means. I think a lot of political posturing went into the bill, such that it was made to please as many Democrats as possible rather than being as good a bill as possible,” Anton said.

But, he added, insurance is “just one more thing I don’t have to worry about.”