Among its popular features, the Affordable Care Act allows people under the age of 26 to stay on their parents' health insurance, meaning they don't have to sign up for health coverage on their own until that time — likely through the ACA's exchanges, if they're not covered by an employer's plan.
However, The Hill reports that one provision could be keeping more young, healthy adults from signing up for their own coverage — and that's working against the success of the ACA.
About 3 million people are insured under their parents' policies, and that's approximately double the number of people aged 18–25 who have actually bought insurance on the exchanges.
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The lack of young people covered under the exchanges is not helping the ACA's stability. In fact, the absence of so many additional customers on the exchanges could actually threaten the ACA's survival. With insurers panicking about the number of sick and older people enrolled under the ACA and some dropping out of offering coverage on the exchanges altogether, one of the act's successes is also one of its biggest handicaps.
John McDonough, a senior adviser to the Senate committee that wrote Obamacare, was quoted in the article saying, "I think that is an argument that has some validity." McDonough, who now teaches at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, points out that "[i]f we didn't allow these kids to go on their parents' plans, many of these kids would have gone to the exchange and would have created a more stable marketplace under the exchange."
The Obama administration is making a big push during this year's open enrollment period, the administration's last, to recruit more of those young people to the exchanges. Among its efforts are campus enrollment drives and ads on Facebook and Instagram.
The plan was for adults under the age of 34 to make up 38 percent of insureds on the ACA marketplace. That, however, hasn't happened; instead, federal data indicate that this year they only make up about 28 percent. And while that might be a failure as far as recruiting young healthy people to help balance out older, sicker customers, it's an overall success as far as actually making sure people are covered by insurance.
Jonathan Gruber, another expert involved in the drafting of the healthcare law, said in the report that omitting the provision allowing the under-26 crowd to be covered by parents' insurance would have resulted in more uninsured people overall. He said that people between the ages of 18 and 25 are more likely to be uninsured than any other age group.
While the Congressional Budget office estimated in 2010 that young, healthy customers using the exchanges would lower premiums by 7 percent to 10 percent, that hasn't happened, as those customers opted to stay on their parents' policies. Instead, the flood of people who were previously uninsurable because of health issues that either made them uninsurable or their premiums unaffordable have resulted in an average premium increase for 2017 of 22 percent.
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