University Drops US Students’ Health Insurance, Tells Them to Sign Up for Obamacare

Missouri State University announced on Tuesday it will not offer students who are U.S. citizens health insurance plans, but will require foreign students to purchase them.

MSU told KY3.com that the number of U.S. students choosing to opt into the university’s health insurance plan dropped from 400 to 188 in a decade, so the university decided to stop offering it to Americans altogether.

The students affected are those who are older than 26, at which point Obamacare drops them from their parents’ insurance coverage. MSU saw that only those who had a medical condition that needed to be treated would sign up for their healthcare plan, which drove up costs. Not enough students signed up for the university’s plan to offset this high-risk pool, and rather than mandating students buy coverage, they cut foreign students’ plans by $218 and stopped covering everyone else altogether.

“My hope is that at some time, we’ll be at a point where we can afford to offer it to graduate students,” said Dr. F. David Muegge, director of the Taylor Health and Wellness Center. He added:

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 for graduate students across the board. 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.

Dr. Muegge praised Obamacare while noting a similar model would wreak financial havoc on his university.

He said:

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. So yes, I do think those are good policies, although they’re not as inexpensive as the university-contracted one.

Foreigners on F-1 and J-1 visas, which cover full-time international students and exchange students, can choose plans that cover both them and their dependents.

MSU suggests that American students sign up for Obamacare.

Email Katie at kmchugh@breitbart.com.