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Affordable Care Act protecting hundreds of thousands of young adults

Remember how I was saying that when people know what’s in the Affordable Care Act, they very often realize how important it can be for them? Well…

Hundreds of thousands of young adults are taking advantage of the health care law provision that allows people under 26 to remain on their parents’ health plans, some of the nation’s largest insurers are reporting. That pace appears to be faster than the government expected.

WellPoint, the nation’s largest publicly traded health insurer with 34 million customers, said the dependent provision was responsible for adding 280,000 new members. That was about one third its total enrollment growth in the first three months of 2011.

Others large insurers said they have added tens of thousands of young adults. Aetna, for example, added fewer than 100,000; Kaiser Permanente, about 90,000; Highmark Inc., about 72,000; Health Care Service Corp., about 82,000; Blue Shield of California, about 22,000, and United Healthcare, about 13,000.

And that’s just in the first year. In the next month or so, many more young adults will be graduating from college, and many of them won’t yet have jobs that offer insurance. So that’ll be another wave of young people and their parents who get, very concretely, what the Affordable Care Act does for them.

(Via Balloon Juice)

Tags: Affordable Care Act, Health Care