Noah Jabusch
College is often regarded as a transitional experience from childhood to managing adult responsibilities, including living on your own, substantial control over your schedule and paying bills for housing, food and health insurance. NC State offers a special health plan for students without existing coverage, and in fact requires that every student present proof of insurance to not be registered with the plan.
However, we must all eventually leave our beloved Wolfpack, which is where the Affordable Care Act comes in. Obamacare — as the law is more commonly known — helped millions of Americans gain health insurance, but its impact is particularly pronounced for young adults.
Attempts to repeal the ACA are likely to hurt college students most of all, so this issue is of prime importance to the NC State community.
The law recently received some positive news in North Carolina, as Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, the state’s largest health insurer, plans to lower premiums for ACA plans in 2019. This would be the first rate decrease since 2014, when the law was first implemented, according to WUNC. Across the state, premiums are expected to fall 4.1 percent on average, although some counties will see slight increases.
The decrease comes after four consecutive years of rate increases while the company adjusted to the new law. However, the premiums could have been an additional 15 percent lower, if not for the uncertainty injected by Congress and President Trump’s attempts to repeal and destabilize the law.
While the rate drops are promising for the stability of ACA marketplaces, they offer little respite to people who have been priced out of the markets. Enrollment has decreased since 2016, partly due to rate hikes, and partly due to cuts in funding for “navigators” who help enrollees understand the ACA exchanges.
The law has survived 70 different attempts to repeal it, including a particularly contentious attempt in 2017, which failed by just one vote in the Senate. Contrary to President Trump’s assertion via tweet that Obamacare would “implode,” the act seems to have finally found its footing. As some of its key beneficiaries, students at NC State should be immensely grateful that the ACA remains in effect.
Many college students are shielded from high rates because all Americans under 26 are allowed by the ACA to stay on their parents’ health plans. However, young adults as a whole are still the most vulnerable to these fluctuations. CNBC notes that, “The rise in uninsured rates was most pronounced among younger adults, blacks, Hispanics and low-income people.” Meanwhile, the Census Bureau found in 2016 that, overall, younger adults have higher uninsured rates than older adults.
An array of factors contribute to this difference, including entry-level employment positions having fewer benefits, young adults’ generally weaker financial standing and a tendency for this group to feel they don’t need health insurance. The ACA attempted to resolve many of these issues by adding the 26-year-old parental coverage provision, federal subsidies to low-income individuals and the individual mandate.
2018 is an election year, and every seat in the House of Representatives is up for reelection, including all of North Carolina’s 13 districts. The New York Times compiled a list of how every Representative voted on the final repeal bill, so no matter where you live, you can see how yours voted.
The law is far from perfect, but a Congress that is friendly to the ACA could actually work to resolve some of these underlying issues and lower costs for everyone, rather than trying to inflate premiums by continually pushing policies that reduce its effectiveness and frighten insurers. As students, we must fight for policies that serve our best interests, and Obamacare clearly works to our advantage.