Bowie State, Md.’s Oldest Black College, to Drop Student Health Insurance

The student health care plan offered by Bowie State University, Maryland's oldest historically black college, is an example of one of those "substandard" plans President Obama, the Affordable Care Act's architects, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have been determined to extinguish.

Well, they've gotten their way. Rather than continue a plan whose costs would have gone from $54 to $900 per semester, an increase of over 1500 percent, the university has dropped the plan. Many students are angry, and have criticized the President directly, as seen in a video at CampusReform.org. News coverage of this calamity has been sparse, to say the least. Excerpts from a report at Washington TV station WUSA follow the jump (bolds are mine):

Health Insurance offered to all 5,500 students at Bowie State University has been cancelled because the bare-bones plan does not meet the minimum standards for Obamacare.

The cancelled plan offered $5,000 worth of medical coverage to students for just $54 per semester. University administrators said an acceptable replacement under the Affordable Care Act would have cost $900 per semester, a 1500% increase.

Administrators have decided that health insurance will no longer be mandatory for enrollment at the University.

Students who need individual coverage are likely to find a better deal for themselves on the state's Maryland Health Connection insurance exchange, said University spokesman Cassandra Robinson.

Most students are covered on the family policies held by their parents until age 26, a significant Obamacare benefit.
The Associated Press's national site has from all appearances not covered the story.

As seen here, a Google News search on ["bowie state" health insurance] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) pretends to tell us that there "about 309 results." At the end of its first listing, it claims that there are "4,209 news sources." But clicking on "All 4,029 news sources" leads to only 13 actual listings, none of which are from establishment press outlets.

Google has some serious work to do on its results counters.

A search on the same results string at Bing returned 15 relevant results; 4 of the 19 actually returned are on other topics. Only one, a section in a blog entry at the Baltimore Sun, can be considered a form of establishment press coverage.

If a Republican- or conservative-driven policy caused such havoc at an historically black college, we'd hear about it for weeks.




Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2013/11/16/not-establishment-press-news-obamacare-causes-bowie-state-md-s-oldest-bl#ixzz2kpvOEgfK

fshnski wrote:Most students are covered on the family policies held by their parents until age 26, a significant Obamacare benefit.

That's the real story, the one the Republicans are trying to repeal!

Gee … What happens if the parents have lost their insurance? They might be part of the 5,000,000 (Five Million) Americans that have already lost their insurance because of the obamanation that is obamacare.

Students were paying so little before because the coverage they received was so scant. The costs have gone up because under ObamaCare, plans must offer coverage for services like annual checkups and alcohol abuse treatments. Because they offer a wider range of services, the premiums also increase.

According to the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities, students at nine schools in the state saw the cost of their policies triple, Paul Shelly, a spokesman for the organization told North Jersey.com.

It’s been a similar story across most of the country.

According to a 2008 study by the Government Accountability Office, about 6,000 students or about 7 percent of the total number of 18-to-23-year-olds in college, bought their own insurance, usually through plans arranged with the school.

The same study found that 60 percent of schools’ plans had coverage of $50,000 or less for specific conditions, and almost all the rest had some sort of payout caps that they will have to do away with by 2014.

In the past, students at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kan., were offered a one-year plan that cost students $445, with payouts capping at $10,000. For the 2012-2013 academic year, the payout cap was increased to $100,000 per the new health care overhaul, which meant students at Bethany would have to shell out more than $2,000 for coverage. It apparently was too much in the end.

Bob Schmoll, Bethany’s vice president for finance, told The Wall Street Journal, the school “decided not to offer coverage for our students next year” given the proposed increase in premium. Schmoll says the school could have kept the limited-coverage plan but that it would have financially not been feasible.

Administrators at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, Cornell College in Iowa and the University of Puget Sound in Washington also told students they would be dropping school-sponsored coverage. The three schools say student premiums would have gone up 10-fold.


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/18/students-suffer-sticker-shock-from-obamacare/

The crummy plans should be done away with. I always carried health insurance for my kids when they were separated from my coverage. (No age 26 rule back then) All it takes is one cancer event to bankrupt a family, and I wasn't taking that chance.

What if you couldn't afford it for your kid? What if there is no father in the child's life? How about if there are 4 or 5 or 6 kids? What do you do if you had your insurance cancelled because of obamacare?

Those plans are worthless anyway! What good is $5 thousand worth of coverage if the kid runs up a bill of $200 thousand for cancer surgery and chemo? They're still going to declare bankruptcy! Is that what this country is all about?

News Buzzard wrote:Those plans are worthless anyway! What good is $5 thousand worth of coverage if the kid runs up a bill of $200 thousand for cancer surgery and chemo? They're still going to declare bankruptcy! Is that what this country is all about?

You are very free with some one else's money. One in a thousand students might have the problem you state. What about the other 999 who won't face that problem?

The odds are probably much higher than that. It was a guess on my part. I can name the young "sick" people that I know on one hand. You know, as well as I, the vast majority of people are healthy.

fshnski wrote:

News Buzzard wrote:Those plans are worthless anyway! What good is $5 thousand worth of coverage if the kid runs up a bill of $200 thousand for cancer surgery and chemo? They're still going to declare bankruptcy! Is that what this country is all about?

You are very free with some one else's money. One in a thousand students might have the problem you state. What about the other 999 who won't face that problem?

That kid is going to be subsidized anyway, either by his parents or taxpayers.

WHL wrote:That kid is going to be subsidized anyway, either by his parents or taxpayers.

So what's the point of a policy that tops out at $5 thousand worth of coverage? My kid got hurt and needed surgery in college. How much good do you think that $5 thousand would have been worth to me?

You guys are on another planet!!!

It wouldn't have been much. It would have paid 5, that's it. That's the risk these kids are taking. They are betting on the odds that they won't need more than the 5 if they do, they will have to come up with it, get it from their parent's get it from taxpayers or get it from a fund. That's the way it has always been and Obama care changes nothing. Somebody else pays now, somebody else pays under Obamacare.

WHL wrote:It wouldn't have been much.  It would have paid 5, that's it.  That's the risk these kids are taking.  They are betting on the odds that they won't need more than the 5 if they do, they will have to come up with it, get it from their parent's get it from taxpayers or get it from a fund.  That's the way it has always been and Obama care changes nothing.  Somebody else pays now, somebody else pays under Obamacare.

Your'e right! Only now,under obamacare, it is going to cost the productive part of our society even more money!

Well, I heard the real kicker last night. Wait til you hear it. I will try to find a link somewhere because you just won't believe it. Someone found in the bill that in the first 3 years that the insurance companies will be paid by the taxpayers for any losses and in the first 5 another percentage for any losses. So if we are subsidizing the premiums (or paying them completely) and then paying the insurance companies, then we are paying twice. But I will try to find a link. Melissa Francis was talking about it.

I saw that too. I'll try and find it.