Young Adults

Ed Emmerman's a happy guy, and not just because he'll be able to stop paying college tuition for his older daughter, Sarah, 21, when she graduates with a bachelor's degree from the University of Vermont later this month. He's also pleased that Sarah will be insured for the foreseeable future. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as the recent healthcare overhaul law is known, Sarah, currently looking for a job as an event planner, can remain on her parents' plan until age 26. So can millions more soon-to-be college graduates who traditionally have lost health insurance coverage once they pushed that tassel over the mortarboard.

Young voters are tuning out the 2012 presidential campaign and fewer have registered to vote than four years ago, when young adults were a key element of Barack Obama's coalition.  But several factors could limit Mitt Romney's ability to benefit from those trends, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis . The study found, for example, that the drop-off in young-voter engagement in this year's election has been even greater among those...

When Abby Berendt Lavoi graduated from college, she got a job in New York making television commercials as a full-time contractor for one of the largest media companies in the world. She was eligible for health insurance only after she had been working there for a year. Ten months into the job, Berendt Lavoi came down with painful stomach cramps. Terrified, she used Google to find a hospital that would accept patients without insurance, and underwent surgery to remove an ovarian cyst the size of a softball.

Sexually transmitted diseases -- so easy to get, so difficult to remember how or when. That's not quite the conclusion of a new study published Monday in Pediatrics, but suffice to say: Don't take a young adult's claim of abstinence as proof he or she is disease-free. (The same may well hold true for older adults, but this study was limited to the young variety.) Researchers at  Emory University analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and tested 14,012 of the respondents (with their permission)

Are America's teens and young adults addicted to the Internet? There's no good way to tell, according to a paper published online Monday in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. That's in part because there's very little consistency among studies on the subject, so it's hard to pinpoint trends in the data accurately. Internet addiction has sometimes been defined as "problematic Internet use that is uncontrollable and damaging. " Studies have drawn possible links between Internet addiction and depression, excessive alcohol use and even injury.

Reporting from San Francisco -- Janette "Netty" Navarro used sing-song sounds to make her needs known. John Hernandez was admired for his sweetness — and his insistent style of letting others know when he was hungry or thirsty. Monica Calderon, joyful and affectionate, was beside herself when she and other young women from the group home were hosted at a local high school prom. They prettied up for the occasion, wearing make-up and corsages. The disabled young adults — ages 22, 21 and 24, respectively — died along with two others when the Mt. Carmel Adult Residential Facility, a single-story home in the Northern California town of Marina, became engulfed in flames late Saturday.

Hundreds of thousands of young adults are taking advantage of the healthcare law provision that allows people under 26 to remain on their parents' health plans, some of the nation's largest insurers are reporting. That pace appears to be faster than the government expected. WellPoint, the nation's largest publicly traded health insurer with 34 million customers, said the dependent provision was responsible for adding 280,000 new members. That was about one-third of its total enrollment growth in the first three months of 2011.

As many as a million young adults have signed up for health insurance in the last year, new data indicate, suggesting an early benefit of the healthcare law President Obama signed last year. A survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the number of Americans ages 19 to 25 without insurance fell to 9.1 million in the first three months of 2011 from 10 million in 2010. And a Gallup-Healthways poll found that the rate of uninsured adults ages 18 to 25 fell to 24.2% in the second quarter of this year from 28% last fall.  Starting last September, the new health law began allowing adult children up to age 26 to remain on their parents' health plans.

One of the first provisions of the federal healthcare overhaul — allowing young adults to stay on their parents' health insurance until they turn 26 — is expected to make a big dent in the number of uninsured young people this year. The change will make it easier and cheaper for thousands of 20-somethings to obtain insurance, even in states where other options have existed for several years. Young adults like Casey Schick, 23, of Glen Rock, N.J., and Meghan Mullooley, 22, of Lyndhurst, N.J. — who have part-time, entry-level or unpaid jobs, if they have jobs at all — have the lowest rates of insurance coverage of any age group.

As the world has urbanized, public health needs have changed. For most of the 20th century, epidemiologists worried about communicable diseases killing very young children. Now, a new paper in the journal the Lancet suggests, the bigger concern in many countries is mortality among young adults ages 15 to 24 -- especially young men.  Modernization and urbanization may have pushed back disease.  But they have made accidents, suicide and violence more common causes of death during the second decade of life.