In New York City, millennials are refusing to see doctors who treat adult patients and are instead remaining in the care of the physicians who treated them as children.
The New York Times has the story — mostly by way of a series of vignettes about well-heeled twentysomething Manhattanites and their doctors.
“I don’t have to leave Dr. Murphy, do I?” asked Lule Rault, one of the millennials cited by the Times. “I’m only 26!”
Rault, a 26-year-old medical student at Tulane University in New Orleans, said she hopes to keep seeing her pediatrician at Uptown Pediatrics on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side until she is 29. She’s had the same doctor since she was a baby.
“The last time I was there, he told me there was one patient older than me — a boy,” Rault added.
On her Facebook page, Rault likes The Notebook (twice), The Girls Guide to Fishing and Hunting, The Hotchkiss School and all things Harry Potter.
Another Manhattan millennial, 20-year-old Carleton College student Andrew Ruvkun, said he is also perfectly content to see his pediatrician.
“He signs off on my NCAA forms, and he’s the only doctor I’ve ever known,” Ruvkun, a runner, told the Times.
On his Facebook page, Ruvkun likes The Browning School, Carmelo Anthony and pretty much every New York City sports team.
Murphy, Rault’s doctor, noted that pediatricians continue to see full-fledged adult patients in New York City because many doctors who treat adults have incredibly long wait lists or won’t accept the insurance coverage offered by new millennial patients. Some of them demand a retainer as high as $3,000 just to schedule a visit.
“The patient, or parent, reasons that it makes more sense to just stay with the pediatrician,” Murphy told the Times.
Murphy noted that his waiting room is now divided. One side has toys designed for babies and little kids. The other side is a typical waiting room with racks of magazines.
Another Upper East Side doctor, Ralph Lopez, suggested that grownup millennials who see pediatricians is something probably unique to New York City.
“Your mom and dad may pick out an internist for you, but you don’t like the doctor, so you stay with someone like me,” Lopez told the Times. “I’m seeing two 25-year-olds later today.”
There’s no hard-and-fast rule about when a person must graduate from a pediatrician to a doctor who treats adults. Customarily, the age has been around the time a person goes to college, but the age has been creeping upward.
“My official rule is it is really time to go when you yourself are ready to have a baby,” Upper East Side pediatrician Cynthia Pegler told the Times.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, America’s parents can keep their children on their insurance plans until the kids reach the age of 26.
Millennials, if you are not up on your demographic jargon, are the cohort of young people born roughly between 1980 and 2000. It’s the term baffled academics and journalists have chosen to bestow on the generation after Generation X.
A Pew Research Center poll from May found that members of America’s millennial generation are more likely to live at home with their parents than with a spouse — or, say, a live-in boyfriend or girlfriend.
In addition to refusing to see a doctor who treats actual adults, millennials also support U.S. military intervention including the use of ground troops against the Islamic State and believe that the 2015 outbreak of #BlackLivesMatter protests will fail to create any meaningful changes in American society, according to a Harvard University survey conducted last year. (RELATED: Harvard Survey Shows Majority Of Millennials Favor War On ISIS, Are Cynical About #BlackLivesMatter)
And they like to shop at discount stores. (RELATED: Their Unrealistic Expectations Crushed At Last, Wealthy Millennials Now Shop At Dollar Stores)
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