MIAMI—As federal health officials are aggressively courting young adults to sign up for health insurance with celebrity endorsement and social media campaigns, they are also getting significant help from the very demographic they’re targeting.
Busy medical, nursing and law students across Florida are getting certified as counselors and are staffing enrollment events as the March 31 deadline to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act looms. Many of the students were active in outreach programs to provide medical and legal services in low-income neighborhoods, but being “able to sign up patients for health insurance and get coverage that’s more than just one time care really completes the circle,” said Ali Moody, a second year medical student at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
More than 60 UM medical students went through a five-hour training to become certified application counselors and have enrolled more than 50 people since December. They’ve staffed several major enrollment events as well as manned tables daily outside their school, where they end up enrolling many low-income patients recently released from the nearby hospital.
University of Miami’s medical school places a strong emphasis on connecting students to underserved communities “so it’s natural to have them take an active role in getting the same patients enrolled in the Affordable Care Act so they get preventive care more frequently and keep them out of the emergency room,” said Donna Shalala, the school’s president and former Health and Human Services Secretary under President Bill Clinton.
Farther south at Florida International University in Miami, seven students were crammed around a massive conference table this week all trying to sign up for health insurance on their laptops.
Law students Allan Zullinger, 28, and Anthony Rouzier, 27, hustle back and forth across the room, overseeing two and three enrollees at a time, all in various stages of the application process, explaining to a professor and his wife that they must use next year’s tax income to determine if they are eligible for a subsidy and telling a student that they may qualify for insurance under their parents’ plan because they are under the age of 26.
Rouzier frequently peers over Valentina Adarraga’s laptop, cheering her on, getting on the phone with federal health officials when her application stalls and explaining various health plans during the nearly three-hour-long process.
