Student Health Insurance

An introduction

They're the best years of your life. You're young, you're strong, you're healthy. It'd be easy to think that you can survive without insurance. But don't fall into that trap, or you could end up in a very sticky situation indeed.

If you or your children are heading off to college, student health insurance is one of the essentials you should be buying along with the clothes and the textbook - and in fact, given the cost of textbooks in America, insurance gives you much better value for money.

What can go wrong when you're twenty years old?

It may seem that students in the prime of life don't need health insurance. But in fact, insurance does more good for them than it does for their ailing parents. The reason? It's all about confidence.

Students tend to have a cavalier attitude to their health. Dangerous pranks, junk-food diets, and experimentation with drink and drugs all show that they take their health for granted.

For the same reason, many of them won't visit a doctor until it's almost too late. Often these youths have never experienced a serious health problem in their life, and they still have delusions of their own immortality buried deep within their minds.

But, as with any other group, things go wrong. The end of puberty is a typical time for the onset of many ailments. These ailments range from eczema and migraines up to testicular cancer. Some problems which often develop at this age, such as schizophrenia, can be very hard to diagnose and treat accuately.

This is where student health becomes so essential. First, a good comprehensive package will include some form of check-up. This can often identify problems while they are at an early stage, and can be treated relatively easily. Even without checkups, insurance can help identify problems earlier, because students with insurance are much more likely to visit a doctor when they need to. It's particularly important because of the financial worries that are so common among students - they need to be confident that getting the help they need won't become a crippling financial burden on them.

This is one of the reasons for the ever-increasing trend towards compulsory student health insurance.In some colleges and some areas of the USA, it is now mandatory for all students to take out some basic health insurance. That's a good step towards reducing the problem of under-insured students, but it doesn't go nearly the whole way.

Dropping out

One massive danger of inadequate student health insurance is the impact of ill-health on a young adult's studies. In an unfortunately large number of cases, poor health can force a student to drop out of college.

This can be catastrophic, both in the short term and the long term. In the short term, it may well not be possible to reclaim fees for courses that a student was unable to attend through illness. Moreover, the separation from their work can remove that sense of purpose that is crucial for students just as it is crucial for the rest of the world.

The long-term impact of dropping out of college is even greater. The employment market now demands a college degree for almost any skilled work. Those whom illness has prevented from obtaining a degree are doomed either to sink in the job marketplace, or to laboriously and expensively return to college.

In some cases, of course, this is unavoidable: those who fall extremely ill may need to devote all their energy to staying alive, and will be unable to manage study or work.

But in a greater number of cases, proper support will enable a student to continue their studies. If this is at all possible, it is clearly essential to do all that can be done. And student health insurance allows that to happen.

Support can come in many forms, of course. Personal assistants can be very helpful - taking notes or escorting ill students to lectures is often important. Psychiatric help can enable troubled young people to cope with the stresses of university life. This benefit of health insurance is not to be understimated: dropping out because of mental health problems is astoundingly common, and can often be avoided with the help of good student health insurance.

Sports and ailments

Student health insurance also helps smooth out some of the inevitable bumps and hitches in any student life. Sports injuries are a good example of a problem which is inextricably linked to the university experience, and which is magnified by the absence of proper care. Physiotherapy from qualified specialists makes a huge difference to the speed of recovery, and to the overall wellbeing of the student.

For all these reasons, student healthcare is an important aid to a young person, and it is important to choose the right package - not just settle for one that gets the job done.