Is it better to go without healthcare or buy into an extremely bad student plan? I live in NYC but am not a resident yet?

Any coverage is better than no coverage. Buy into the plan.

If you have to go without health insurance, your age is the time to do it. You generally use the least amount of services around college age. If you need to see a doctor, it’ll most likely be a lot less to pay out of pocket for the once or twice you need to go.

However, as @La_chica_gomela said, insurance is a good idea. Just in case of catastrophe.

I don’t think it’s true that any coverage is better than no coverage. This plan sounds like a scam. What you really need when you are young and healthy is catastrophic coverage. This plan obviously does not meet your needs. Hang onto the premium and take your chances.

I would take the coverage. If you don’t have an uninterrupted period of insurance coverage, any future insurance companies will consider your medical issues to be “pre-existing conditions” and will probably give you grief.

Don’t they have an on campus medical center for minor things? $250/mo for major medical with a $1000 cap is ridiculous. If you don’t have any chronic condition, put the money into a savings account and use it to pay for things like a sprain. If you have something major, go to the public hospital and pay on the sliding scale for low-income patients. What @Dr_Dredd said is not necessarily true. The insurance companies are going to lose on that one.

Hopefully you’re right, @galileogirl. For now, though, I wouldn’t take the chance that insurance companies will be prevented from doing it.

I think as a grad student you would have been able to figure out that they’re basically taking your money ($1,000) to pay-out up to (in other words, max) $1,000 of hospital bills. If you don’t use the benefit, then they make an easy $1,000 in 4 months.

Go get an entry level job that you can handle around your schedule that offers health & welfare benefits and use the earnings to pay the contributions. Of course, it may take upto 90 days before you are offered any benefits, but atleast you have something to look forward to.

Look into other plans for individuals that are major medical with really high deductibles. That way you are covered in case of something catastrophic.

@galileogirl i’ll check into that campus med center; catastrophic coverage is pretty much all i am interested in, I’m 28 years old and I have no chronic conditions; i’ll look into that sliding scale thing as well.

I guess if i’m not going to get coverage I should at least know what my options are outside of that. Anyone know a good place to begin my research?

Health Insurance

Colleges…all schools for that matter are petri dishes for germs and disease and other surprises. I would spend the money!

look into GHI Healthy NY… they have some relatively inexpensive plans but i’m guessing you’ll need to be a resident ps, i’m an LIU alum

I work across LIU
I’d say given that you are in college and that you don’t have time to sit around an emergency room for hours (because that’s how it goes here in Brooklyn), get the college insurance (I know it’s too much money, they’re hustling you) and that way you’ll just go to the clinic at school.

From personal experience, I would take some kind of medical coverage over none. About 10 years ago (in my early 20s), I went without health insurance for a year or so. I was pretty healthy, but then I sprained my ankle. I ended up having to pay $900 dollars for that debacle (hospital visit, x-ray, ace bandage). I was paying it back 10 bucks at a time for a while. If that little problem cost me 900 then, I wonder what it would cost now.

You can still visit the ER without making any payments. If you are broke enough, the hospital will cover the cost.

Also check local hospitals to see if they offer the Hill Burton act