Reply to Tell me why you think 26 year olds should be covered under parents' insurance

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I agree that children should be covered through their college years - why up to age 26?  Why did this become the cut-off age?  Was there some data that the administration used to determine this age?  Seems to me that most kids leave college at age 22 or 23 at the latest after 4 or 5 years of undergraduate work. I think 26 is a bit old to be considered a "dependent" that needs coverage from a parent's policy. [/quote]

The extension in age to 26 came about because of the poor job market.  As college graduates become more and more common, there are far larger numbers of recent grads with no work experience flooding the job market.  That plus a lot of older workers who are retraining for new jobs, and the number of entry-level positions is just too small to handle the addition of so many workers into the workforce.  [b]So, there is an increasing number of young adults who are finding it necessary to go back for graduate or professional school and there is a growing number of such students who will be 25-26 years old when they get their first job that offers their own health insurance. [/b] However, by and large, this is one of the healthiest demographics of adults and hence the most profitable for the health insurance industry.  In order to help cover the costs of ensuring that everyone including less healthy never-before-covered individuals, they added the young adult students.  As has been pointed out, adding in these young adults is actually a good thing as their premiums will help keep the associated costs of providing insurance to many less-healthy that are now mandated that the insurance companies must insure.  The costs are spread out and this keeps those who have always had insurance from seeing skyrocketing costs from adding that large population of expensive-to-insure individuals.[/quote]

I think OP and these perplexed pps are not familiar with the concept of graduate school or something... that was my immediate thought when I heard people can stay on their parent's plans until 26- "great!  they can stay on through grad school, law school, MED school!"  The insurance coverage offered by my grad school was atrocious and expensive (and insurance coverage was mandatory to go to that school), and would have just added to the already exorbitant cost of grad school.[/quote]

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