We have a kid at college in Massachusetts, a state that requires all students to have health insurance. Every year, she has to log-in, upload our insurance card (and some other info), and waive the college health insurance. We always waive it, because we have good insurance that has coverage in every state

We have Kaiser and they don't have Kaiser where our kids go to college, so we kept them on Kaiser and paid for the college insurance. It's a lot more than what we want to pay but we didn't want to give up their doctors at Kaiser but we wanted them to be covered in case of an emergency. My son hit his head his first year and had to get an MRI at a hospital near his school, so I was glad we got the insurance. This probably isn't the best financial decision, but we weren't sure what else to do.

I kept her on my insurance through college and the year after graduation (when she was living home, with no other benefits). Now she is in grad school, and her stipend covers the student health insurance, so she switched to that. She is largely financially independent at this point.

But in college, it just seemed easier and more predictable to keep her on our "normal" insurance. (Her doctors were still home, for example)

Anonymous wrote:Even if you have to pay extra fees for out of network , it’s prob worth it to take that gamble. For my kid school insurance was $1200 a year. So as long as any fees are less than $4800 over the 4 years we win. Chances are kid doesn’t need any medical care at all.

Didn’t matter fur us in the end. Although my kid missed the deadline to waive it two of the 4 years, the school reimbursed us with proof of coverage.

This is what we realized. Turns out student health services refuses to take any insurance but it was still cheaper to pay out of pocket than to pay for their health insurance.