Health Insurance Articles

How Older Children May Affect Health Insurance Rates For Families

2011-01-30

If you have older children who need health insurance coverage, you may wonder how they will impact your health insurance policy. The effect of younger children on their parents' health insurance costs is well known - insurance rates can be high for extremely young kids. Parents often see their rates change greatly from year to year as a child gets older. Getting health insurance coverage for your older child will involve taking on some additional costs, but the amount of the increase will vary depending on a number of different factors.

Having any individual added to a policy will increase the cost of that policy, of course, as more people need to be insured. This cost increases when older children have pre-existing conditions or when they are not healthy. An overweight child, for instance, will have a greater chance of developing a number of diseases and conditions, and unfortunately, the health insurance company will attempt to charge their clients more because of this. You might decide to encourage an older child to stay in shape if you are applying for health insurance coverage, but be sure to do so in a positive way. Talk to your doctor for tips and to learn about tests that might be able to prove an older child's overall health to a medical insurance provider.

If an older child is healthy, getting health insurance coverage for the individual may be quite simple, and adding your older child to your policy may not result in as much of a rate increase as you might have anticipated. This is because healthy older children are less likely to report a claim than healthy younger children. Therefore, children under the age of thirty will behave just like another adult on your policy, will benefit from the same coverage (provided that they have not had a lapse in their own coverage), and will result in increased health insurance rates that are comparable to what you pay for yourself.

Contact your health insurance company to discuss adding an older child to your health insurance coverage. They will usually need to know whether or not the child has always been covered under a health insurance plan and information about any diseases or conditions that the child has had over the last few years. You can look for health insurance quotes online to get a general idea of the cost of adding an older child to a policy and for more information on your health insurance coverage. However, only your health insurance provider can give you an accurate idea of how much more you will have to pay to add a child to your existing health insurance policy.