When you’re young and healthy, why would you need health insurance?

Host: When you are young and healthy, why would you need health insurance?

Bob Hurley: Speaking to young invincibles about health insurance is extremely challenging. I have some young adults in my own family, my children who happen to be 23 and 21 years old and when I sit down and talk to them about health insurance, it's difficult. They just don't get it, they don't understand why they need it. It's important for me to reach them and so therefore, it's important for me to reach other people that are watching this video today about why it's important to have a health insurance program.

Many of us are very active when we are young. I was active once too and we get out on weekends and we hop on our mountain bikes and we decide we are going to run through the mountains on a mountain bike or we get out on a river and we decide that we are going to go down the rapids with our friends and have a good Saturday afternoon of fun.

We are just very active at that age in our lives and those are exactly the kinds of activities that can lead to frankly, accidents for ourselves. We may end up breaking a leg, breaking an arm, falling of our mountain bike and hitting our head on a rock, these are all stories that have come at me from young people who have had that experience and they didn't have health insurance coverage and now they are faced with a hospital bill of $10,000 or $12,000 and in some cases, more than that and they simply didn't know that they could have had a health insurance plan for $50, $60, $70 depending on the city they live in that would have taken care of those catastrophic losses.

Now here they are, they are young, they don't have a whole lot of money and now they have got a large healthcare bill to deal with. So I always, whenever I talk to the young invincible group, those people that are in their 20's or early 30's I always encourage them go out and find a health insurance plan, it gets you that access to care when you need it, it protects you from those bigger things that happen when you are out having some fun over the weekend or whatever and then obviously, part of that group of young invincibles is also those 30-34 year olds and often, they are just starting a new family. Many times they are starting to settle down or getting married, starting to have children critically important for those folks as they turn that next chapter in their lives to get coverage for themselves and their spouse and certainly, some day hopefully, their children so.

It's hard to talk to this age group, it's hard to convince them that this is important thing that they need to do. So I simply reach out to them and say it is very important. You can get help doing it, I know you haven't probably done it before. You can get help, go online, you are hi-tech most of you, get on to the internet, you can go out shop, compare, you can see what's affordable for yourself and then pick up the phone and call us and talk to somebody and get the help you need to get the plan that will work for you. But the good news is you can get a good health insurance plan that's very affordable especially young people and I encourage you to get out and do that today.