WASHINGTON – Jennifer Henson had a lot to worry about when she decided to try to break into New York City’s acting scene after graduating from college six years ago.
“I was a hostess at a restaurant, and auditioning, and working as an actress – and not being paid,” said Henson, who is now 29.
But Henson did not have to worry about health insurance, thanks to an unlikely source: the Mormon church.
Since 1994, the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it is formally called, has offered to cover its employees’ children until age 26 – more than a decade before many states caught on to the idea and started passing laws requiring insurers to extend dependent coverage well into adult children’s mid-20s.
Because the Mormon church also offers the benefit to anyone who works for a Mormon-owned company – regardless of where they live or what religion they practice, Henson was covered through her mother, who works in human relations at a Washington radio station owned by a church subsidiary.
“It was definitely a blessing not having to worry about health insurance at that point in time, being a college student and not having hundreds of extra dollars,” said Henson, who now runs a production company in Los Angeles.
With young Americans more likely to be uninsured than any other age group in the country, some members of Congress are kicking around a solution that could be similar to the Mormon plan, writ large.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week announced that her chamber’s health care overhaul bill would include language to allow young people to piggyback on their parents’ insurance until their 27th birthday – long enough to ride out the job-hopping and financial tumult of their early years in the work force. One bill circulating in the Senate includes a similar provision.
Though congressional Democrats say they haven’t yet crunched all the numbers, a recent study by the Commonwealth Fund suggests such a proposal would help cover more than 2 million of the nation’s 13.7 million uninsured young adults.
The Mormon church’s plan, handled through Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators, covers about 33,000 dependent children in all 50 states, said a company spokesman.
Henson’s mother, Joan, said her premiums were “a little bit higher” when her daughter joined her plan, but she said the worry it saved her made up for the extra cost.
In 1994, Utah became the first state to pass a law saying insurance companies under its jurisdiction must provide coverage for dependents until age 26. Due to its nonprofit status, Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators, doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the state. But the Mormon church decided to go along with the law, anyway, perhaps due in part to the fact that many Mormon 20-somethings spend two years working as missionaries.
“Those two years out of your life kind of set you behind a bit,” explained Layne Sybrowsky, director of client services for Deseret Mutual. “So I think that dependency on parents for an extra couple of years probably helped the state legislature.”
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that many other states began to pass similar laws, and there are now 30 in effect, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
However, the state laws have a loophole. Businesses that operate their own employee health plans – rather than buy them from an outside provider – are not subject to state health insurance regulation. That leaves about 55 percent of Americans who are covered by so-called “self-insured” plans outside the jurisdiction of the state laws, according to a 2007 study by the National Academy for State Health Policy.
Though the details of the congressional plans are still being hammered out, staffers on Capitol Hill say both the House and Senate proposals would apply to self-insured health plans.
Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, D-Pa., who introduced the measure in the House, has hailed it as a “no-cost, bipartisan solution to give young adults a path to affordable health care.”
Democrats like Dahlkemper say adding statistically low-risk young adults to the insurance pool would lower premiums across the board. Insurers’ cost of the extended coverage would likely be passed on to parents, in the form of a premium hike, say health care policy analysts.
“Certainly, you’re not going to have extra people on without any change in what families are giving to their insurance companies,” said Dahlkemper spokeswoman Marie Francis.
That’s good news for insurance companies, which would be poised to pick up about 2 million new clients.
“We believe it’s important, for a variety of reasons, for everybody to be covered,” said Susan Pisano of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group representing some 1,300 insurance companies.
But extending dependent coverage is hardly the panacea for covering young adults, especially ones from low-income families, said Kathryn Schwartz, a senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“While there are some [uninsured young adults] who have recently graduated from college, a lot of people didn’t even finish high school,” Schwartz said. “Those patterns tend to replicate themselves.” She said the young people who didn’t get high school diplomas often come from low-income families in which parents do not have employer-sponsored coverage.
Ryan Cravalho, a 19-year-old heating and cooling technician from Stafford, Va., is covered under his father’s plan through the military until age 22. He said he’d jump at the chance to stay on the plan four more years so he could continue to save money.
“It would help me have more success in my career,” Cravalho said. “My job is dangerous; I work with electricity. I could have some safety and security.”
Henson, now 29, is no longer eligible for the Mormons’ plan through her mother, but has health insurance through what she called an “exceedingly overpriced” plan she pays for herself.
“Ideally, I think family members should be family members and be able to stay on forever,” Henson said.
Added her mother: “I think it’s a great benefit, if that were to happen with all insurance companies. I wish they would have kept her until she was 30.”