We switched to a Blue Cross plan for a while at the family level the very reason you are stating. Although you have to make sure the plan you have does include OOS access to the national network. But most blues plans through employers do. It is a compelling reason to switch if you or the other parent have the option.
In recent years, for various reasons we haven’t had a family plan available for my youngest (now a college senior). What we did is purchase an individual plan in our home state through a provider there (probably used a BCBS provider because we wanted a national network). I have now done this four years in a row, and moved states once in the process. You will have to jump through a lot of hoops to prove that your kid really has your address as their home address – my kid needed proof of enrollment at their OOS college showing that they were a full time student and on campus (beyond just the tuition bill, which I felt was PLENTY of proof… but I digress). And you can only enroll during the open enrollment period near the end of one year and beginning of the next. Also, some of the blues have stopped including the national network in plans sold on the individual market, a trend that I noticed just this year (BCBS MN stopped it, and one of the blues in Washington state did as well). The cost for a year this year in our state is about $3,400 for a silver plan with a $3,000 deductible. There was at least one cheaper plan with a higher deductible. Of course, the kid can go to the campus health center for minor stuff when school is in session.
I don’t know if you could get an insurance company in their college state to sell them an individual plan or not. We never tried that. You have to prove residence in the state to the insurance company’s satisfaction, and that could be challenging. A college student from OOS might not be able to do that.
The problem with both of these individual options are that the possible repeal of all or part of the Affordable Care Act could wreak havoc on the individual insurance market. Plans may become more expensive, be unavailable altogether, or go back to providing poor quality insurance (items you would want that aren’t covered and you don’t realize it until you need them, possibility that they could cancel the plan if your kid gets sick, lifetime or annual caps, etc.). And I have a strong suspicion that the repeal efforts are going to have some way of retaining the ability to be insured if you have a pre-existing condition, BUT you won’t be able to have an insurance gap. So you have to be VERY careful about end and start dates each time the kid changes insurances (which could happen every year with individual plans – it has with us). And the school plans have kind of funky dates that don’t start and end on the first or last day of a month like individual plans do. Say you buy an individual plan that ends on Dec 31, and want your kid to pick up school insurance for the 2nd semester. The school insurance might start on Jan 3 – and you have to get your kid coverage somehow for that 3 day window to avoid a gap. You likely would pay for a whole month (January) of some kind of bridge plan (so yet a 3rd insurer).
If there is truly no plan offered for sale at the college where they are going, I would not rely on the individual market. It is just too risky in my opinion given the changes that are probably going to transpire in the current political environment.
It is fiendishly complex. I work in the health care industry, so feel pretty well equipped to handle it. But I end up frustrated and tearing my hair, and sweating the timing and coverage every single year. I am also a huge proponent of single payor or allowing some way to buy into Medicare for younger citizens. Although our family has been thankful for the ACA (it has definitely helped us in several ways), it is not a great system. Employer based healthcare is just unworkable for too much of the population (students, small business owners, people who want to retire early, people who can’t find full time work, etc.) Unfortunately, I think the upcoming actions are going to break our system so badly that people will be making decisions like not going to college out of state or closing small businesses because there are no individual plans to be had for love nor money.
