Written by Lauren Bucher
About 30 percent of young adults in America do not have health care coverage, a statistic that makes them the highest uninsured age group in the country. The Affordable Care Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law on March 23, 2010, began a health care overhaul, and under the new law, young adults can stay on their parents’ health insurance policy until they are 26, a stage of the reform that was enacted at the end of September.Previously, insurance companies could remove children from their parents’ plan as early as age 19. While many plans made exceptions for full-time students and extend coverage time until graduation, all plans used to stop coverage after a child graduates college or reaches age 25.Young adults will be able to remain on their parents’ plan regardless of whether they are married, live with their parents, are financially independent or are in school. A married person under age 26 will continue to receive the benefits of their parents’ health care plan, but these benefits will not pass on to their spouse or their children. People who are offered health insurance by their employer will be omitted from their parents’ plan.After graduating from college, many students are left uninsured. The entry-level or part-time jobs that they take during their transition into the professional world do not generally come with employer-sponsored health insurance.”I think it’s a good idea especially in this economy because lots of college students are going to be unemployed after they graduate,” senior political science major Jane Messina said. “Before the law, they would just go to the emergency room when they were sick, and that would increase health care debt. But now that students will have health care, we won’t have to worry.”Extending health care coverage to dependents is one facet of the Affordable Care Act. The reform is being implemented in stages, and most pieces of the new health care bill will be in place by 2014. The reform is expected to extend coverage to an additional 32 million people. The objectives of the reform are to extend coverage to more people, address insurance company abuses, reduce the deficit and increase the effectiveness of health care.Young adults represent more than one out of every five of the total number of uninsured persons in the United States, according to a report issued by the Department of Labor. An estimated 50.7 million people were uninsured in 2009, a 16.7 percent jump from the 46.3 million uninsured people of 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
