For someone looking for work during an unsettled economy, Matthew Janes ’07 seems to be in a reasonably appealing position. Armed with a Stanford degree in symbolic systems and over a year of experience at Palo Alto tech company mSpot, Janes has the right credentials for a permanent programming job. He is even making some money during his job hunt by doing contract Web design work.

But Janes and other work-seeking graduates overwhelmingly absorbed with finding post-college work are also dealing with another issue: the fact that they often lack standard health care coverage during the job search process.

Stanford requires every enrolled student to have health insurance–an “individual mandate” in health care parlance. If a student is not covered under an outside plan (usually his or her parents’), the student must purchase Cardinal Care, the University-run health insurance plan, for a premium of $800 per quarter.

This ensures that Stanford students have health coverage through their education. However, neither Cardinal Care nor nearly every parental health plan is available to Stanford alumni after their graduation.

Many companies offer group health plans to their employees, but when a graduate wants to freelance or work at a start-up or a small company that does not offer insurance–or when work is scarce in a down economy–this makes the months and years after graduation perilous from a health insurance standpoint.

The United States Census Bureau estimates that 15.4 percent of the population was without health insurance in 2008. Of those 46 million people, over half are between age 18 and 34. Young alumni are in the age group most likely to be uninsured.

Most of those interviewed by The Daily try to solve the problem of insurance by purchasing high-deductible emergency health plans. Bryan Schell ’07 gets a basic level of coverage from this type of plan as he works an unpaid internship at the United Nations Refugee Agency in Washington, D.C. He hopes the internship will open doors for future employment (and health coverage), but for the moment he can only afford a basic plan on his own.

Under Schell’s plan, the insurance company pays for expenses after the first $1,000, so it doesn’t help with check-ups and prescriptions. In the event of a major accident, though, Schell would have help with the ensuing costs.

“I’m young and I don’t have any health problems, so it’s ideal for me,” said Schell, who is paying rent out of savings and small earnings from a part-time job.

But underinsurance can be almost as big a problem as being uninsured. The Census does not project the number of underinsured people, but a post-college emergency plan, which may be the only option available to an alum seeking work, is sometimes just not enough coverage.

Janes understands this better than most. While searching for an employer–and a health plan to replace Cardinal Care, the insurance he got as a dependent of his parents and mSpot’s group health plan–he enrolled in a high-deductible plan. It is, according to him, for “car crashes and chainsaw accidents.”

The plan barely helps with prescription costs, a pressing matter for Janes because he has Type 1 diabetes. Insulin and testing strips cost him $200 to $300 per month now, compared to $25 to $50 when he was on Cardinal Care. He has started to skimp on testing strips, resulting in occasionally erratic blood sugar levels, and is now searching for employer-based health insurance as much as for a job now.

“I’ve had to cut back on a lot of medical care I’d been getting,” Janes said. “A group health plan to me is worth over $1,000 a month on top of a salary.”

Janes is watching the progression of health care reform in Congress with a particularly critical eye; among the provisions in the House and Senate bills that have both passed is one that allows children to remain on their parents’ health plans through age 26, instead of getting kicked off during or after college. Janes, 25, would appreciate that more comprehensive coverage as he looks for employment.

“That would mean huge savings for me and much better medical care than I’ve been getting,” he said.

Through awareness of the recession and the congressional health care debate, Stanford students are becoming more conscious of the health insurance trouble their demographic group steps into after leaving the University. But the search for a job, even one that does not offer insurance, outweighs other considerations. In the minds of most Stanford students looking for something to do with their lives, it appears that the job comes first, and health care comes second…or not at all.

Lance Choy, director of Stanford’s Career Development Center, says that in all of his career counseling, he cannot remember getting a question about health insurance from a student.

“It just doesn’t come up,” Choy said. “Sometimes they ask about retirement, but I don’t think a lot of students think about health insurance much in their 20s unless they’ve got some sort of preexisting condition.”

Seniors tend to be the most concerned with the prospect of finding health insurance in the outside world. Tommy Tobin ’10 was one of a handful of interviewees who expressed concern about his health insurance situation after graduation. However, it was clear which was more important to him.

“Work is a bigger concern,” Tobin said.

Lindsey Smith ’10 was also anxious about health insurance post-college. She said a lack of health benefits in one job could end up being a deciding factor if she were to choose between offers. But if employer-based health benefits were scarce, her answer was the same as everyone else’s: she would take any job she could get regardless of the insurance situation.

“I would take [a job without benefits] if I didn’t have other options for employment,” she said.

For students who are further from leaving the “Stanford bubble,” the question of health coverage is further from their minds.

“I’ve thought about what I want to do and where I want to go, but I haven’t considered that [health care coverage] very much,” said sophomore Colin Gray.

“I’m still on my family health plan,” said Eric Miller ’12. He has kept abreast of the debate over health care reform, but said that on a personal level, it hasn’t greatly impacted him.

“I’m focusing on my classes for now,” he said.