Nearly 200 students at Missouri State University will be left without health insurance thanks to a decision from school administrators to axe a university health plan for US-born students, local news station KY3 reported this week.
During the 2015-2016 school year, Missouri State will continue to offer insurance for international students per requirements, but domestic students will have to seek coverage elsewhere.
Administrators say the falling number of domestic students opting to use its insurance plan – roughly 188 last fiscal year, versus about 400 a decade ago – has made the high cost of the optional insurance plan too large to justify. They also laid blame to certain provisions in the Affordable Care Act, which they say increase the cost of offering coverage to all students.
Dr. F. David Muegge, director of the school’s Taylor Health and Wellness Center, said some of those requirements also provide viable options for students currently on the school plan.
“The Affordable Care Act wrote a lot of new requirements, you know, that take some of the excess profit out of insurance and that put a lot of requirement in as far as what they have to cover, like wellness and cancer care coverage and some of the things that people really need,” said Muegge. “So yes, I do think those are good policies, although they’re not as inexpensive as the university-contracted one.”
The vast majority of students affected by the change were adult students or graduate students too old to be included on a parent’s insurance plan and dependent on the university for coverage. They were also more likely to have a medical problem, which drove up the cost of care and, consequently, the cost to the university of providing insurance.
Muegge said he hopes health insurance plans for domestic students will return in the future, provide the risk pool is more diverse.
“My hope is that at some time, we’ll be at a point where we can afford to offer it to graduate students. And if we had a big voluntary pool like that, whether they’re domestic or international or whatever, if they were again in a fair, representative, actuary risk pool, my dream would be that we could offer it to graduate students across the board,” he said. “But we don’t have that scale yet, or that heft, and then also we just don’t have the economy for it just yet.”
In the meantime, Missouri State is offering an online service to affected students to help them find alternative insurance plans.
International students covered by the university plan will see their annual premium drop by $218 as a result of the changes, the university said.
