@WWWard - @CADREAMIN - What is your experience with the cost and quality of USC health care if you have waived the student insurance and use your own employer provided insurance. I noticed on the USC Engemann site that they do not bill the insurance company if you visit the University Park Health Center. Seems like they provide you with a receipt to use for reimbursement. This sounds like a pain in the neck. Raises the possibility of having to haggle with the insurance company constantly.
Is it better to find an in-network provider and just have your dependent student use that facility? Same question as above for Dental and Vision care.
USC charges students a health center fee by semester. That fee covers access to the health center and its staff as I understand it. Or - at least we have not seen any extra charges or fees. That is presumably why visits to the health center do not generate an additional fee. In my daughters’ cases, I just decided to go with the USC provided/mandated Aetna Insurance for students… for the sake of convenience while they are students.
Our kids went to the USC health center as an urgent care place as needed. They didn’t have any extra fees or charges associated with going there. We also had them seen at the USC med school, health campus when we went with the kids for move-in day, so they would have providers if they needed more care than the urgent care the health center offered.
For the doctors at the Health Campus (free shuttle from the regular undergrad park campus), the doctors billed our BCBS insurance and were participating and preferred by our insurer so we paid our ordinary copay of $15 per MD visit and had all tests and lab work covered under our BSBS plan. Our kids didn’t see the doctors much until D was in her last few semesters of college. The physicians she saw varied a bit but we are glad that D really likes at least one of the doctors at the USC medical school, who has referred her to additional physicians she also likes and are also in-network for our health plan. D has chronic health issues and the USC doctor and his team are working to help her get better and live a more active life.
We always showed proof of our BCBS PPO plan before registration and opted out from the USC insurance plan (which met all the requirements and was better than the plan we could have purchased from USC). We did pay for the USC student insurance when our S was in his SR year because he was aging out of our family plan that year. He never used the USC plan to see any providers so we have no experience on how that went. D has always been covered under our plan.
@WWWard - @CADREAMIN - @HImom - Thanks for the feedback. When I went to orientation with my daughter, I discussed this with USC and they seemed to recommend using my own insurance; or at least, indicated that using one’s own insurance was very common.
What concerned me the most, if using parents insurance, was the Engemann website indicating that the student would be billed and given a receipt to use for reimbursement from the insurance company. That just seemed like a real pain in the neck. I was on the phone for a couple hours talking to USC Keck today and confirmed my insurance is good throughout Keck (I’m on the east coast). Probably a good idea to get her set up with a PCP anyway. This would also motivate her to head over to the USC Medical Campus as she would likely be looking at internships there in the future.
I foresee her maybe visiting Engemann for her urgent care needs and Keck for more diagnostic/wellness, etc. I am still curious how they do the billing at Engemann. If the student use’s the USC insurance, should be pretty seamless. Hopefully, at Engemann, using the parents insurance doesn’t blindside me with a huge bill that I need to deal with the insurance company.
I can’t recall ever seeing any bills from my kids using the campus health center and the physicians in the Health Science campus who were in network, other than the minimal co-pay. Since my kids both have chronic health issues, USC strongly encouraged us to have our kids establish relationships with MDs at their Health Sciences campus, so their records would be intact there and they could get care if they needed it. S never sought nor received care other than the initial visits. D has gotten care there and found it to be of very good quality. We did NOT have to deal with sending bills to our insurer–USC handled whatever paperwork there was for the insurer to pay and we just paid the copays.