Recruiting young, healthy individuals is a key factor in the success of Obamacare. Enrolling the younger individuals is also an important element in keeping the cost of insurance rates down. If enrollees are only composed of the older, less healthy individuals, rates would continue to rise.
That’s why Covered California focused much of its efforts on recruiting at California State University campuses. They chose to recruit at the CSU systems because the population is composed of a diverse demographic. Their primary goal was to get individuals and families on campus covered through the state run exchange.
Their initial benchmark of success for this project was to get 450,000 students covered. Before the program kicked off, there were around 25%-30% of unenrolled individuals. After numerous in-class presentations by a selection of campus ambassadors, there are now about 10% of unenrolled students on the trial campuses. The most significant percentage of change in coverage was from the Latino student population. Latino enrollment dropped significantly from 40% to 13%.
According to the director of the CSU Health Insurance Education Project, Walter Zelman, the program was a huge success. He believes that this is the perfect place to find young, computer savvy individuals with low income who will qualify for subsidies.
More information regarding the CSU Helath Insurance Education Project can be found here.