I’m a student coming back to the US after three years in France and Taiwan. In both countries, I had health coverage. In the US, I will not. I will also not be coming back to work, rather to start grad school. What sort of options are there for people like me to get health care?
What I’m most worried about is getting moles removed. I’ll get some more removed before I leave Taiwan, but I come from a family where nearly everyone over 40 has had skin cancer (including both of my parents, numerous times). The only way it was caught was by regularly seeing a doctor and getting lab tests done on certain questionable moles or marks.
My wife, who’s Taiwanese, will be covered (as far as I understand), by her current insurance, but I don’t have anything.
What sort of programs are there for people like me?
If it helps, the grad schools to which I’m applying are in D.C., NYC, and Boston.
Don’t the grad schools require health insurance? In my experience, most universities do, but that was a long time ago. If you aren’t covered on your own, they provide it for you (at a cost, of course.)
You can go any medical facility you can pay for out of pocket or buy individual insurance from the insurance companies. That’s mostly your options, and you don’t even need to tell me you can’t afford that. Neither can a lot of people here. Get all the work done you can before you get here.
I’ve heard something to that effect, but I’m not sure about the schools I’m applying to. In any case, that’s just going to put me further in debt at the end of school.
Grad school normally provides low cost coverage (my law school does, its $800/yr, which, you’ll admit is beans on top of grad school debt) as well as use of the on-campus health center which is free (usually decent enough for ordinary things like colds, sprains, rashes, etc).)
New York offers a state-sponsored insurance program, Family Health Plus which despite the name, applies to individuals without children. Its free if you make less than $16,000 in your household.
I don’t know about other states, except I am 90% sure Massachussetts has something similar.
In addition, different states have different rules about individual insurance, and programs vary by state; when I lived in Virginia I actually had excellent individual health insurance at a very reasonable price (I feel like it was around $50/mo (I only made $7,000 that year) through Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
That’s crazy. Have you looked into individual insurance? I just fooled around with the Anthem website for 10 minutes and found numerous options for a couple in their 30s under $500/mo total (some as low as $140)
Yeah, your grad school will almost certainly require you to have health insurance, and if you don’t have it from somewhere else, they’ll have cheap insurance you’ll have to get. Now whether it will cover mole removal or not is anybody’s guess.