A pilot program aimed at bringing young people into the state’s health care exchange by offering them a subsidy has been “tremendously successful,” advocates say, but is scheduled to sunset in 2025. Photo by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images.
State lawmakers, county executives and health care advocates said they hope to extend a “tremendously successful” pilot program that lowers health insurance costs for young Marylanders, which is currently set to expire next year.
“As the only physician in the Senate, we know it’s important to get as many people covered under health insurance as possible,” Sen. Clarence Lam (D-Anne Arundel and Howard) said Tuesday. “It not only helps our patients that we see, but it also helps our entire community.”
Lam will be the lead Senate sponsor of legislation for the 2025 session to extend the sunset of the State-Based Young Adult Health Insurance Subsidies Pilot Program from 2025 to 2028. He was joined at a news conference in Howard County by Sen. Brian Feldman (D-Montgomery), Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman (D), Howard County Executive Calvin Ball (D), as well as state health officials and health care advocates.
Tuesday’s event calling for a extension of the young adult-focused subsidy program was ironically located in the East Columbia 50+ Center, a community center focused on residents aged 50 and older.
According the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange, the state’s insurance marketplace under the Affordable Care Act, young adults are one of the largest groups of people in the state who do not have health insurance.
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“We really need that group for the insurance pool,” Feldman said. “These are folks who think they’re going to live forever, never get sick. And in insurance, the way it works is you need young healthy people to bring down the cost for everybody else.”
Under the 2021 law, Marylanders aged 18-37 who make up to 400% of the federal poverty level can receive a subsidy that lowers their health care costs when they purchase a plan on the state’s insurance marketplace. The pilot program is set to expire in 2025 if the General Assembly does not chose to extend it.
The discount amount varies based on income and age, but the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange says young adults receiving the subsidy see an average reduction of $40 in their monthly premiums. The subsidy is funded through assessment fees on insurance companies.
Vinny DeMarco, a health care advocate and president of the Maryland Health Care for All Coalition, said Tuesday that the program has been “a tremendous success” at recruiting young people into the marketplace.
Since the subsidies began in November 2021, youth enrollment on the exchange is up 46% and more than 57,000 young adults are benefiting from the state’s subsidies for health care plans in 2024, MHBE recently reported.
While getting more people enrolled in a health care plan ensures that they are covered in the case of an accident or illness, it also helps keep rates down for all other insurance customers, Pittman said.
“This is really really simple stuff,” he said. “If we don’t continue to help our young people … to get into the exchange, the rates will go up for the rest of the people in the exchange.
“Young people often don’t get insurance because either their employers do not provide it directly, or they just feel like they’re not vulnerable and not going to get sick and they’re not going to get hurt,” Pittman said. “We need to get them in.”