<p>I’m not interested in joining this fight, but just want to give a piece of information:</p>
<p>No, employers are not rushing out of the box to have everyone add their up-to-age-26 children right now. The law says that plans with an anniversary date after September 23, 2010 must make that change for their next plan year. For most plans, that means the change becomes effective January 1, 2011. For collectively bargained plans, employers don’t need to do this until the collective bargaining agreement expires.</p>
<p>IMHO, health care reform is a wonderful thing, but it has numerous different effective dates for all of its different provisions.</p>
<p>Edit: I didn’t see that Moondogguy already wrote what I just wrote.</p>
<p>If the COBRA option is $550 a month, that means your employer is paying $550 a month to insurance your 24 year old, or around $7000 a year.</p>
<p>By keeping him on the plan for two more years, your employer will pay $14,000 extra minus whatever your monthyl premiums are.</p>
<p>Where are you proposing that your employer should come up with the additional $14,000 * number of 24 years on healthplans in your company. Should they increase the monthly premiums that everybody pays? Should the owners accept a smaller profit margain? Should they reduce benefits?</p>
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<p>Nobody should be without health insurance. However, a healthy 24 year old male/female will find it much more cost effective to pay for the rare doctor appointment out of pocket and have the health insurance pay for the big items. This is like homeowners insurance. You don’t turn in every little thing into the insurance company but you do turn in the big losses you can’t afford.</p>
<p>To the best of my knowledge and understanding, this is correct. The new law takes effect this coming autumn. So, for those who have open enrollment periods during June/July, children up to age 26 will not be eligible until the June/July enrollment period in 2011. </p>
<p>A couple of other things to note:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>One of the big reasons why you won’t see early implementation is because employers still do not know exactly what will be required of them/their health care plans under the federal legislation. The new laws provide for regulations to be promulgated that will provide the parameters that employers/health plans need in order to make sure that they fit themselves into the rules. These regulations haven’t even been proposed (published in the Federal Register) for comment and discussion. Until they are proposed, it is nearly impossible to say exactly how everything will play out.</p></li>
<li><p>The employers with which I work are all considering all of the following: (a) making sure that children up to the age of 26 who are allowed on their policies do not have access through any other means to health care insurance (in other words, no insurance available through graduate school, an employer, etc.), (b) causing the rates for adding a newly eligible child up to 26 to reflect the entire cost of that insurance (in other words, the equivalent of COBRA) and (c) changing the way family coverage is provided at all levels, including charging more for each dependent (rather than just providing family coverage) and charging more for “bad” behaviors like smoking, drinking, obesity, etc. Many employers are also discussing phasing out their coverage completely over time. I am confident that there will be no free ride.</p></li>
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<p>Bluebayou…here is my issue and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Our open enrollment period ends June 15…BUT our insurance coverage year begins September 1. I need to know what coverage to elect beginning Sept 1. I KNOW the law doesn’t take effect until Sept 23…but do I elect family coverage and pay Cobra for Sept? Do I elect two person and will they let me change to family on Sept 23? Or are they simply going to let me elect family and be done with it. I NEED an answer before June 15…so do a lot of my coworkers in the same boat. All I want is an ANSWER. If I have to pay the Cobra rate for Sept to keep continuous coverage, I will…but I need to know. And does that mean I"m paying for a family plan for Sept when really I’m not GETTING a family plan because my DD’s coverage is through COBRA. I want the union lawyer to get me an answer…this has nothing to do with a negotiated contract at all.</p>
<p>Edit…after reading more on this thread…all I can say is OH MY…hope this ALL gets sorted out…I’m disgusted because I PAID for a family plan that is in effect until August 31. </p>
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<p>On this…I totally disagree. DD had an emergency procedure done in January…a complete surprise medically and something most 20 somethings don’t deal with…total bill was almost $100,000 before insurance which paid about $25000…docs and hospital wrote off the rest because she HAD insurance and they had to take the allowable costs. Thank God she had insurance.</p>
<p>Thumper, if your open enrollment ends in June and your plan year begins before the law takes effect, than likely your employer will not cover your up-to-26-year-old child until the next open enrollment period and plan beginning in June and September 2011.</p>
<p>Sally…we have Anthem…is that the same as Wellpoint which Sebelius got to agree to do this coverage now?</p>
<p>Gotta ask…my DD is on my family plan now…and will remain on it until end of August. So…what is the difference between her insurance liability between August 31 and September 1? Seems to me, her “risks” aren’t significantly increased. If they were covering her all along…what difference does it make? Maybe I’ll have her enroll in 12 credits at the community college.</p>
<p>I, for one, am delighted with the possibilities for health insurance for my 2 Ss. S1 is long out of college but has a job that does not provide health care. He was a grad student for 2 semesters and was able to get student coverage that way once he aged out of our insurance. As I have posted elsewhere, I forced him to sign up for the summer extension of his student insurance. Someone was looking over our shoulder, because he had appendicitis over that summer. Even with a 23 hr. hospital stay and laprascopic surgery, the total bill, including all physicians, was nearly $30,000. Even though the insurance paid for a lot of it, he was still left with nearly $7000 in bills. Something he would have been years paying off, if we had not been able to help. He now has coverage through Assurant for approx. $70/month. It, too, is more or less catastrophic coverage. He had an emergency room visit for food poisoning that was another $1500 in bills left to him. He is a healthy male with no underlying conditions. </p>
<p>I always have a nagging fear of a car accident, even relatively minor, broken bone or some other illness (H1N1) that might cause thousands of dollars in health care costs to a healthy person. Not only are there insurance costs, but if he is not able to work, there is no income. </p>
<p>S2 is still in college and I am so grateful we will be able to keep him on our policy longer. </p>
<p>I truly feel for those whose children have chronic illnesses. Just among my sons’ close friends there are kids with diabetes, mild cystic fibrosis, and severe asthma. I can only imagine the worry of their parents.</p>
<p>I, for one, am happy to pay and have my children pay for health care we may or may not need right now to help cover older/sicker folks. That’s the whole point of insurance. I get annoyed at people who claim they are healthy and shouldn’t have to pay anything and this is some kind of unfair imposition or scam when those individuals are only the next car accident or broken bone from being in a serious situation themselves. Then, of course, they’d want “someone” to pay for their care when the bills mount in the tens of thousands of dollars.</p>
<p>yeah, I get your issue (I manage benefits for my company). Congress clearly wrote the law to take effect for all plan years/renewals six months AFTER enactment. Congresspersons did not care about your issue. (Sorry.) Your company may care but unless your union care, your company can/will do nothing. Your union contract is your union contract, and they should be your first call.</p>
<p>And, of course, Sally is correct. The age is only one small, simple change in a 2000 page bill. In addition, the bill requires/changes to some kinds of services, such as mandating preventive care. All of these will take time to actuarially calculate, price and for the feds, produce regulations.</p>
<p>Maine already requires insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. To be honest, that’s good and bad, because the policy has made premiums skyrocket, but it helps our family. Anthem (Wellpoint) is really the only game in town now, because all of the other insurers have been scared off or quote prices so high you know they’re not really interested in your business.</p>
<p>My husband and three kids will ALWAYS have to be covered, because they have a mild bleeding disorder that is not a problem at all unless 1) they are injured severely and start bleeding, because then the bleeding doesn’t stop easily; or 2) they need surgery. In either case, they would be given recombinant Factor VIIa. My husband needed two doses of that for his recent thyroid surgery - JUST the medicine cost $43,000! That’s not a typo. So I know I have no right to complain about high premiums!</p>
<p>Of course. Health insurance premiums are going to go through the roof. New York state is the model and it’s heavy regulation has resulted in back-breaking insurance premiums. Conveniently, the local paper, the New York Times, waited until after the national bill was enacted to write about the disasterous impact of similar politices in New York state.</p>
<p>So as a 17 year old, I go to the doctor once a year. I am covered under my parents’ plan right now but I think if I go off of the plan and pay the doctor out of pocket (or have my parents pay) once a year, that would be about 200.00. If I get sick and have to visit her then that would be another 200.00. So 400 a year vs 333 a month for a whole year. If I have an emergency (accident, broken leg,…) then I will have to go to a hospital and at that point I can pay the hospital 333 a month instead of the insurance co. It might take a lifetime to pay it off but as the healthcare PROVIDER will tell you, they rather we pay them than the insurance companies…</p>
<p>So back to my question about Anthem/Wellpoint. In the OP, it was stated that Sebelius got Wellpoint to cover this year’s grads now…Is Anthem the same as Wellpoint (we have CT Anthem BCBS) and will this deal with Sebelius affect my ability to get coverage for my kiddo upon graduation in August?</p>
<p>And yes…I’m planning to call my union lawyer next week (school is on vacation now). I’m sure the union is trying to figure this out for it’s membership.</p>
Nope. If the student is on the parent’s plan and they have a family plan already - the employer is not paying any more money at all.
Right now on our plan, if my kid is not in college she is not eligible to be on my plan. If she takes a year off of college at age 20 - she is off the plan. If she goes back to college at 21 she goes back on the plan again. Same thing, only different ages.</p>
<p>If the college grad bumps the parent’s plan from single to two party or two party to family then the employer would pay more - however this is no different than other normal movements - having a baby, getting divorced etc. in a normal employee pool.</p>
<p>SBGIRL, several years ago my nephew took a year off from Yale, and his parents bought him a gap insurance policy at a relatively low cost just to make sure he was covered in case of an emergency. A month or two into his coverage, he was hit by a car while riding his bike. He almost died, spent a very long time in the hospital and in therapy, and his medical bills were in the MILLIONS. Those gap insurance premiums were the best money my brother- and sister-in-law ever spent.</p>
<p>My 20-year-old daughter was sick on a Saturday a couple of weeks ago, and had to miss work on short notice: her employer told her she’d better have a doctor’s note if she wanted to keep her job, so I took her to urgent care. The doctor at urgent care thought she might have meningitis, so he advised us to go to the emergency room right away. Now, I was pretty sure she didn’t have meningitis, but when a doctor writes “GO IMMEDIATELY TO ST. JOHN’S” on your kid’s discharge papers, you do it, because the downside is just too far down. Long story short - she was fine, but the total cost for that evening was $3700, more than she’ll make at her part-time job in a year. (She’s still on my husband’s plan - our cost after insurance comes to around $600.)</p>
<p>That’s why we have insurance - and that’s why I’m delighted that my 2008 graduate, who is currently employed part-time, will be able to go back on my husband’s plan if she still doesn’t have benefits at the end of the year. I’ve been piling gap policy upon gap policy while we wait for her insurance through her school’s alumni association to be approved.</p>
<p>They will be, just as soon as the insurance companies re-price the group policy to reflect the higher number of people covered. For most workers, employers will probably pass along the increase to every employee currently covered by a family plan.</p>
<p>But there won’t be an increase beyond what is “normal” which is astronomical - since this age group typically makes tons of $$ for insurance companies.<br>
Actuarily, the insurance companies won’t feel a hit at all. They may even make out if they see an increase of two party or familiy plans.</p>
<p>You are forgetting that, in addition to the government mandate that your insurance company cover little Biffy and Buffy after college, there is also a mandate that your insurance company cover aunt Nellie who needs kidney dialysis. Now, covering Biffy, and Buffy, and Nellie may very well be a desirable thing, but to argue that insurance costs aren’t going to increase as insurance companies cover all their existing members PLUS Biffy, Buffy, and Nellie is folly.</p>
<p>one other point: the Wellpoint policy change only includes fully-insured plans. Self-insured plans have the option to wait. Wellpoint covers some Blue affiliates, but not all.</p>