Health Insurers Allowing Adult Children to Remain on Parents’ Policies

Posted in Health Insurance

April 21st, 2010

Health insurance companies have already started honoring one change noted in health care reform: allowing adult children to remain on health insurance policies until age 26. While this part of the health care bill won’t actually take effect until Sept. 23, 2010, some health insurance companies have already created provisions in their policies to allow children to remain insured.

Changes Made to Help College Students

Thousands of college students are scheduled to lose their parents’ health insurance when they graduate this spring. In order to avoid this happening, many major health insurance companies have started changing their policies to keep the students insured.

So far, UnitedHealthcare, Humana, WellPoint and Kaiser Permanente have all made adjustments. This way, those who would have been dropped after graduating because they’d passed the cutoff age of 23 will now be able to graduate without feeling that they need to stay in school just tostay ontheir parent’s affordable health care coverage.

Insurance Companies Aren’t All Bad

Recently, health insurance companies were in the newsfor their attempts to find loopholes inthe health carereform bill.They’d discovered that while they had to pay for children with pre-existing conditions that they’d already insured,to make sure they don’t coverall kids with conditions,they could simply not insure them in the first place.

Many were disgusted to say the least with the industry’s attempts to avoid insuring children. However, this new attempt to at least provide continued health insurance to adult children is a step in the right direction. There are more health insurance changes on the way as the months pass. It will be interesting to see how health insurance companies react to changes along the way.