If-You-Like-Your-Health-Plan-You-Can-Keep-It Surprise of the Day
The word is that the health overhaul bill “could make it impossible for colleges and universities to continue to offer student health plans.” That’s how the American Council on Education and a dozen other higher-ed lobbies put it in a recent letter to the Obama administration, warning that the insurance coverage they offer may get junked by ObamaCare’s decrees.
- Between 4.5 million to 5.5 million students annually are insured by short-term plans sponsored by their schools, which are tailored to upperclassmen who have aged out of their parents’ coverage or to international and graduate students.
- These plans are very low cost because the benefits are designed for generally healthy young people, and often organized around campus health services and academic medical centers.
All of which means these plans aren’t likely to qualify under ObamaCare’s “minimal essential coverage” rules that mandate rich benefit packages, even if colleges have the flexibility to make exceptions for special needs. And given that insurance must now be sold anytime to everyone, colleges may be required to continue to cover students after they’ve graduated — leaving this type of coverage unaffordable, according to the Wall Street Journal.
I think this might be an intended consequence whereby young people pick up the tab on everyone else’s health care.
Only a very small percentage of people will benefit from removing annual limits, lifetime caps and provisions to help adult-age dependants and children with pre-existing conditions enroll in their parents’ health plan. By contract, the number of people who will be harmed when these provisions essentially do away with the health plan they currently have (or would like to buy) is an order of magnitude higher.
I think it’s a bull-in-a-china-shop attempt to ram rod the entire health care system. Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
This is another example of the way that comprehensive legislation containing something for everyone ends up with many provisions that make no sense. Piecemeal changes fully understood would have been a much better way to go.