Fewer grads receive health care coverage

Lyndsay Wengrzyn heard that life after college had its costs and benefits. What she didn’t… Lyndsay Wengrzyn heard that life after college had its costs and benefits. What she didn’t plan for was the cost to be thousands of dollars and the benefits nowhere to be found.

Wengrzyn, a 24-year-old graduate of Clarion University, accumulated $3,000 in unpaid medical expenses during her first job in marketing. She quit her job, which offered minimal health benefits, to move to Florida and soon landed in the hospital with a kidney stone.

The kidney stone racked up $745 in emergency room costs and was an unwelcome addition to her pre-existing stomach ulcers and high blood pressure – both of which went untreated because of little or no health care coverage.

Although she is paying off the bills, this isn’t the scenario Wengrzyn pictured for herself after graduation.

“The real world comes at you fast,” Wengrzyn said. “I wasn’t ready.”

She isn’t the first to get slammed with unanticipated medical bills. Many recent graduates overlook health care coverage during their transition in to the working world.

A recent Commonwealth Fund study found that 40 percent of college graduates spend the first year after graduation without health insurance, an increase of 18 percent over the past four years. This makes them one of the fastest growing segments of the uninsured.

“There are lots and lots of people who sort of get caught in this gap,” said Beaufort Longest, professor of health policy and management at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health.

According to Longest, an incident such as a car accident can be financially devastating for someone without insurance and is a cost that can essentially be prevented if young people take advantage of the lower insurance premiums that are offered to them.

Andrew Hauskins, a representative for the Web site www.healthegrad.com, said that most college students underestimate emergency room costs. Healthegrad.com provides short-term medical insurance to people who are transitioning between life stages. Hauskins said that most of the inquiries he receives are from parents, not students.

According to data provided by the Centers for Disease Control, 21 percent of men and 17 percent of women aged 18 to 24 went to the emergency room for an injury in 2002 and 2003, the largest percentage of any age group.

Hauskins said that short-term plans range from a $250 deductible with a $173 premium to a $5,000 deductible with a $54 premium. Most young people, Hauskins said, opt for the higher deductible.

The online application asks only seven to 10 health-related questions. Short-term carriers don’t do an extensive background check, and Hauskins cautioned that there is a good reason for that.

Pre-existing conditions are not covered by short-term insurance, so someone with a condition such as asthma may want to look at long-term coverage. According to Hauskins, this can cost 35 to 40 percent more than short-term.

Amelia Koehler, a 22-year-old Pitt student, knew that she had to find alternative coverage when she was dropped from her parent’s plan after taking a year off from college.

Koehler has a liver virus that she contracted as a child and knew that her health insurance, which costs her parents $200 a month, was invaluable.

To help out, she got a job at Starbucks where she qualified for medical benefits after working for two months. Now she is required to work 20 hours a week to maintain her coverage, but she was able to customize her benefits package for the best fit.

“It’s hard to say to yourself, ‘I want to spend a couple hundred dollars a month that I might not use at all,'” Koehler said. “Knowing myself and my health history, that was something I knew I had to address.”

For many, a full-time position doesn’t guarantee coverage. According to data from the United States Census Bureau, the number of full-time employees without benefits has risen 2.3 percent in the past five years.

Still, Koehler said that she doesn’t worry about finding coverage after graduation.

“I have Starbucks. Knowing that I have that option is a really nice safety net for me,” she said. “I really feel that if you ask employers and really shop around, you will find a job and weigh the benefits about what’s the real total sum of what you’ll be provided by that job.”

Carrie Dorko, a receptionist at optometrist Rohnda Laughins’ office in Greensburg, Pa., can also attest that recent graduates should learn how the health care system works.

“It’s a game,” she said. “And the person who plays it better wins.”

After dealing with insurance companies daily during her job, she said that people who don’t fully understand their health care coverage can end up paying for more than they planned.

This is the position that Wengrzyn found herself in when she took her first job at Lanier Worldwide Corporations because she was offered a benefits package. She didn’t fully understand that she was responsible for 10 percent of her medical expenses and found herself paying off $3,000 worth of bills while she had health insurance.

“I was responsible for 10 percent. When I was filling out my benefits papers, I didn’t really know what that meant,” Wengrzyn said. “I had no idea that it would turn out like it did.”

Many young people don’t feel a need to bother with health insurance, Katherine Lee, individual health specialist for Aetna Health Care Benefits Company, said. They are deterred because they don’t have much money to begin with and are generally healthy.

“It’s incredibly important,” Lee said. “You might not have a disease or a condition that you would have when you’re 60, but you could go out and break your leg while you’re skiing over the weekend.”

People in the health care business label young people as the “immortals” for their inability to plan for future health problems. Susan Pisano, vice president for communications at America’s Health Insurance Plans, said health insurance companies are beginning to focus on options that might be more affordable for this group.

“There used to be a lot of talk about the uninsured as though they are all uninsured for the same reason,” Pisano said. “I think there is a realization that 20- to 30-year-olds may be uninsured for different reasons.”

She said thought has been put into changing the age by which a child can be claimed as a dependent because many people in this age group live at home and are taking longer to graduate from college. She added that graduates should understand the length and circumstances of their coverage by a parent’s plan.

Longest said that extending the limits of how long a child can be a dependent would be a state-specific decision. “But it will certainly make it easier for a person between college graduation and the next five or six years of their life to have coverage,” he said.

Often, graduates are so eager to find coverage that they take the first job that offers benefits. Barbara Juliussen, the associate director of Pitt’s Career Services, said in an e-mail that other factors should be weighed.

“Students I have worked with have voiced concerns about finding jobs and are very concerned about health care coverage,” she wrote. “I also caution students to realize that a job search is a full time job and takes time.”

Koehler, who plans to go on to graduate school, also places a high value on this sort of knowledge and said that although health care should not dictate employment, it is an important factor to consider.

“As for my friends who are graduating, I don’t expect them to be out there shopping away for insurance,” she said. “But I think it’s definitely something you need to ask about at interviews.”