106,000 people have signed up for the Affordable Care Act through exchanges nationally
20 percent is the approximate percentage of young people who make up the total of those signed up
38 percent is the percentage of young adults the Obama administration hoped would apply for insurance
About 106,000 people have signed up for the Affordable Care Act since exchanges opened on Oct. 1, far below the Obama administration’s expectations.
The number of young adults needed to subsidize older participants signing up for insurance nationally is only around 20 percent of total enrollment. The administration is aiming for 38 percent of total participants to be young adults by the 2014 deadline.
Greg Scandlen, a former National Center for Policy Analysis staff member, said younger people are important to the health of an insurance exchange.
“Younger people don’t consume any services so they are basically subsidizing everybody else,” Scandlen said. “It keeps the overall cost down quite a bit.”
One reason Scandlen said younger people aren’t signing up is because of the prices of the insurance policies.
“They are being drastically over charged for it. It’s a really close balancing act,” he said. “You have to be very careful about charging little enough to get them into the pool, but not so little that they’re not subsidizing the rest of the pool.”
Scandlen said although younger people need to subsidize the older users of an insurance plan to an extent, young people have a lot of other financial burdens to deal with. He also said they are generally paid less than established adults.
“I haven’t seen enough attention given to younger people,” Scandlen said. “A lot of people who are just out of college and are starting out in life have a lot of expenses that older people don’t have.
“They’re just trying to put a life together. It’s simply not fair to expect younger people to be subsidizing older people to this extent.”
Keeping with the national trend, several Ball State students said they will not sign up for coverage. One main reason: students are allowed to stay on their parent’s insurance until they are 26-years-old.
Scandlen said this is also a “terrible” idea.
“It prolongs adolescence beyond any reasonable time,” Scandlen said. “Most insurers have allowed students to stay on their parents’ policy as long as they are registered in school. The Affordable Care Act allows students to be on their parents’ policy, even if they’ve set up their own home, even if they’ve gotten married to someone else and even if there is no dependent relationship whatsoever. That makes no sense to me at all.”
Another reason for a lack in sign-up is that although the average cost of insurance for a young adult is around $260 a month, according to healthcare.gov, the fine for not having insurance is only $95 or 1 percent of a person’s yearly income.
Aidan Hall, a sophomore telecommunications major, said he doesn’t plan to sign up for the insurance.
“I believe that we do need a health care reform but ObamaCare is not that answer,” Hall said.
The insurance exchanges have received criticism because they are hard to understand. This can be doubly so for college students signing up for insurance for the first time. However, neither the Ball State Amelia T. Wood Health Center nor student affairs are currently doing anything to help students enroll in the program.
Chris Mitchell, an undecided freshman, said he knows little about the system and isn’t opposed to the government health care if it is affordable, but probably still won’t sign up.
“Maybe once I get to know it better, I might sign up for it, but I don’t know yet,” Mitchell said. “If it makes health care more affordable, then I guess I’m all for it.”
Although Scandlen thought health care needed to be fixed in the U.S., he doesn’t think ObamaCare is the way to do that.
“I think it was poorly conceived, I think the law was poorly written and it’s being poorly implemented,” he said. “Obviously we do have a problem in this country. Fifteen percent of the country is uninsured and we need to work on that. We could’ve worked on that without screwing everything up.”
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