NIU

health insurance

Posted by Stacy on Tuesday, February 05, 2008 10:01 PM

I’m working at a community center this semester – a friend and I are going to teach theatre to kids. They’re little kids, so it will be more like theatre fun and games time, but that’s all to the good.

We went in yesterday to speak with the director of the center’s after-school program, which we’ll be working with – to have our “orientation,” which consisted basically of procedural outlining and, then, debriefing about this particular population and some of the challenges we might encounter because of it. The director (who, by the way, is fantastic) told us that these kids’ families are mostly at 125% of the poverty line or lower. Well blow me down. 125% of the poverty line sounds like...a lot. Apparently, as she told us, that translates to an annual income of about $17,000 for a single-parent household with one kid.

Alone, I managed to spend $3,500 last semester on rent, food, and school-related costs. Granted, I don’t limit myself too much. I don’t budget well. But now and then, money can still seem a wee bit tight. I borrow from my parents. How would I support myself and a kid on $17,000 a year?

There’d be barely enough food for the basics (food, clothes, etc.) – forget about the things that a family should have but can get by on a day-to-day basis without. I’m taking health insurance as an example. It’s hard to get an individual health insurance quote without going through a whole hoopla of entering information and getting personalized health insurance quotes emailed to you, but I found some national health insurance averages. Apparently, a survey from America’s Health Insurance Plans found average monthly premiums for policies in force in April 2002 to be about $334 for family coverage. That comes out to $4,008 a year. That’s such a large proportion of that yearly income for these kids’ families that I can’t imagine even cheap health insurance being affordable.