As planned during six months following the signing of the health care reform bill, coverage will be extended for dependents up to the age of 26. This will allow parents to continue to offer health insurance coverage to their dependent children, even if those children do not live in the same household. This also holds true for young adults under 26 living out of state, and those that are married. Basically, unless they are offered employer sponsored health insurance, they can continue to remain on their parent’s coverage.  

The deadline to implement this extension of coverage is September 23^rd, 2010. However, numerous insurance carriers have decided to offer the coverage much sooner than that. CIGNA, Humana, United Healthcare, and Kaiser are a few that are increasing the dependent age limit as soon as June 1^st. You can check with your carrier, or with us, to determine how your eligible dependents maintain coverage on your current plan. Regardless of whether a plan decides to implement this change ahead of schedule, health care reform will ultimately bring changes to all plans.

Tags: children's health, health care reform, heath insurance, individual health

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 11:21 am and is filed under Employees, Family, Federal, Individual, Laws, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.