Do College Students Need the Campus Health Plan?

​If you’re packing a child off to college this summer, the extra-long sheets and shower caddies can wait. Health insurance should be at the top of your to-do list.

Many private colleges and public universities require full-time residential students to have health insurance, and some aggressively market their own plans, automatically enrolling incoming students in their insurance plan and adding the premium — which can be several thousand dollars a year — to the tuition bill. If you don’t need it and want to get the charge removed, you must meet the college’s early and often rather arbitrary deadline for proving your child is adequately insured and obtaining a waiver. (This is not a one-and-done, by the way. You must obtain the waiver every year.) Policies vary by school. Some, like the University of Michigan, make health insurance mandatory for foreign students but not for domestic students.

If you’re lucky enough to have an employer-provided family health plan, most experts recommend keeping your child on it. Dependents can be covered on a family plan until age 26 under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare; it’s one of the few components of the A.C.A. that has strong bipartisan support. But no matter how your kids are insured, you’ll need to do some fact-finding to make sure they can get access to health care services in their college town and figure out how much it might end up costing you.

When we packed our oldest daughter off to college, we obtained the waiver but worried. Our family’s employer-provided health plan was excellent, but the university — which was promoting its student health insurance plan — warned us that the health center on campus did not participate in any insurance networks other than the university’s own plan. As a health writer, I knew that meant we could be stuck with some pretty steep bills.

We briefly considered switching to a different plan with a larger network of doctors in the college town — and finally started making phone calls and asking questions. What we found out was that it didn’t really matter what insurance our child had: Full-time students could go to the university health center for primary care services for a $10 co-payment, just by virtue of being students. (The service was covered by a mandatory student activity fee.)

Every university can craft its own policies, but many colleges and universities have clinics that provide primary care services to students, often at nominal prices or even free, according to College Parents of America, a group that promotes completing college, and American College Health Association, a nonprofit association of college health professionals. The clinics often provide student basics like contraception and mental health counseling. But you still need comprehensive insurance for big-ticket items like hospital stays, surgery or more serious illnesses.