UNLV joins final push to get young adults to sign up for Obamacare insurance

UNLV is among the universities around the country participating in a push by the Obama administration to demographically shore up the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace by signing up more young adults.

With the Jan. 31 deadline for 2017 open enrollment via the ACA’s health insurance exchanges drawing near, the university’s School of Community Health Sciences staged an enrollment event and panel on campus Tuesday as part of the White House Healthy Campus Challenge.

The goal of the program is to persuade more 18- to 34-year-olds, known as “young invincibles” for their optimistic views on their future health care needs, to sign up for plans through the so-called Obamacare health insurance exchange.

That would moderate future premium increases, as young, healthy individuals are less likely to have significant and costly health care needs, unlike many of the older, sicker individuals who’ve enrolled in the exchanges, said Ryan High, the chief operations officer of Nevada’s Silver State Health Insurance Exchange.

“Having healthy millennials on the marketplace helps balance the enrollment against those with high claims usage to provide a more balanced marketplace,” he said.

During the 2015-16 plan selection period, about 36 percent of enrollees nationwide were 34 or younger, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But younger adults still make up a disproportionate share of those who have paid tax penalties for not having insurance, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Even though the Republican-led Congress is threatening to repeal the ACA, the Obama administration is making a final push to increase enrollment ahead of the Jan. 31 deadline for 2017 coverage. That is aimed at increasing political pressure on President-elect Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers to spare some of the most popular pieces of the ACA and come up with a replacement that makes health insurance available to most of those previously covered by it.

But Jorge Labrador, a spokesman for the UNLV School of Community Health Sciences, said via email that the campus challenge also is about helping uninsured individuals “make an informed choice about their insurance marketplace options.”

“As young adults enter the job market or lose access to their parents’ insurance plans, they may find themselves with a lot of questions about something that simply used to ‘just work,’” he said.

At UNLV, students between the ages of 25 and 39 made up nearly 26 percent of the 29,702 undergraduates, graduates and professionals enrolled last fall, according to the university website.

That’s an ideal group for the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange to target, as experts have argued since its inception that the Affordable Care Act needs those healthy young adults.

But there are challenges to enrolling those younger and healthier students, many of whom are carrying student loan debt, said Christopher Cochran, chairman of the university’s Department of Health Care Administration.

“If you’re just a young graduate starting out, you’re making $40,000, you’re single … it will be expensive for you to go out and buy insurance,” he said.

In a final open enrollment push, the state exchange will have a “navigator” on campus this week, on Jan. 25 and every Friday through the end of the month to assist individuals interested in signing up.

Contact Pashtana Usufzy at pusufzy@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4563. Find @pashtana_u on Twitter.