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[goldenapple]

I'm curious about the effects the new law will have on our campuses. A colleague and I were wondering how many of our students' enrollment decisions were tied to health insurance benefits. We have no idea, but suspect that there are students who choose to be enrolled full time in order to have access to benefits.

I wonder how the new laws will change this. And will our campuses still offer health insurance as they do now? Do you think universities will make major changes in their health insurance offerings? Will this affect enrollment?

Here's the link the the Chronicle article that addresses some of the questions colleges will be facing:

http://chronicle.com/article/Federal-Health-Care-Law-Wil/65072/

[aandsdean]

As of this moment, our largest concern is actually how much our premiums will increase to cover the extended age requirement for dependents to stay on their parents' insurance.

Our HR people and VP for business services think that it will be what our president calls a "non-trivial" increase.  We're fully self-insured up to a certain amount per covered individual, then covered by reinsurance (I think the reinsured amount is in excess of $80,000/individual/year), so we actually have pretty good control of the premiums, but the problem is that so many young people (i.e., new college graduates who previously would have been ejected from their parents' insurance) now may require to be covered, especially with the economy as it is and the shortage of benefit-bearing jobs.

Fortunately, actuarially, the 22-26 demographic is really healthy and cheap to insure.  However, in a small pool, one really serious illness can dent the reserves quite hard.  We keep around $1 million in reserves, but think about how very few serious medical issues in an employee group of around 250 at $80,000/each cap it would take to exhaust it.  We'll probably add around 10-15 covered individuals a year, and I'm guessing it's going to add around $15/month to the family plan.