Some of the President’s most loyal supporters are the latest victims of his signature healthcare plan: students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s).
According to reports, ObamaCare’s new regulations would spike the costs of student insurance plans from $50 to $900 per semester or $1,800 per year. Schools such as Bowie state have decided to cancel the school-wide affordable healthcare plans they offered students. Again, thanks Mr. President!
Campus Reform reports:
The official website for Bowie State, a Maryland public school less than an hour's drive from Washington D.C., explains that Obamacare's new regulations would force the cost of the insurance to rise from $50 to $900 a semester.
"The cost of insurance for domestic students will increase to approximately $1800 per year."
"Bowie State University has suspended offering health insurance for domestic students for the 2013-2014 academic year," states the school's official website. "Due to new requirements of the Affordable Care Act which will go into effect on January 1, 2014, the cost of insurance for domestic students will increase to approximately $1800 per year."
That works out to approximately $900 per semester. The student health insurance plan had cost students $50 per semester for the 2012-13 school year, according to a cached page of the university's description of the plan. The original link to the description has been deleted.
According to an article in The Bulldog Collegian, Bowie State's official student newspaper, the Director of the Bowie State University Wellness Center said that the university decided it would not be worth it to provide student health insurance at all given how expensive it would be to do so under the new regulations.
If this sounds like déjà-vu, it is. Just last week we reported that community colleges throughout New Jersey cancelled low-cost, bare-bones plans because they were not Affordable Care Act-approved and would have faced paying thousands of dollars more per student.
The President has always been popular with young people so why did he do this? Well, there are two answers.
At best, he didn’t anticipate this would happen. That is the fallacy of central planning; you can never entirely anticipate the unintended consequences of your legislative actions.
It’s similar to what happens on TV shows or movies where a person travels back in time to fix a problem that occurs in the present. They inadvertently set in motion other occurrences that would not have happened otherwise. When Homer Simpson traveled back to prehistoric times, he swatted a mosquito and returned to the present to find that Ned Flanders was the dictator of the world. With each new headline I can hear a big “D’oh” somewhere in the White House and HHS.
Now, at worse, the president was fully aware that the cancellations would occur and welcomed them as part of a strategy to drive people into the public exchanges. Brilliant? Yes. Disingenuous and sinister? Absolutely!
As we reported, the architects of ObamaCare knew years ago that 40-60 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans.
In either case, the losers in all of this are the millions of uninsured Americans, especially young people.