The student health care plan offered by Bowie State University, Maryland's oldest historically black college, is an example of one of those "substandard" plans President Obama, the Affordable Care Act's architects, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have been determined to extinguish.
Well, they've gotten their way. Rather than continue a plan whose costs would have gone from $54 to $900 per semester, an increase of over 1500 percent, the university has dropped the plan. Many students are angry, and have criticized the President directly, as seen in a video at CampusReform.org. News coverage of this calamity has been sparse, to say the least. Excerpts from a report at Washington TV station WUSA follow the jump (bolds are mine):
Student Health insurance cancelled at Bowie State University
Health Insurance offered to all 5,500 students at Bowie State University has been cancelled because the bare-bones plan does not meet the minimum standards for Obamacare.
The cancelled plan offered $5,000 worth of medical coverage to students for just $54 per semester. University administrators said an acceptable replacement under the Affordable Care Act would have cost $900 per semester, a 1500% increase.
Administrators have decided that health insurance will no longer be mandatory for enrollment at the University.
Students who need individual coverage are likely to find a better deal for themselves on the state's Maryland Health Connection insurance exchange, said University spokesman Cassandra Robinson.
Most students are covered on the family policies held by their parents until age 26, a significant Obamacare benefit.
The Associated Press's national site has from all appearances not covered the story.
As seen here, a Google News search on ["bowie state" health insurance] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) pretends to tell us that there "about 309 results." At the end of its first listing, it claims that there are "4,209 news sources." But clicking on "All 4,029 news sources" leads to only 13 actual listings, none of which are from establishment press outlets.
Google has some serious work to do on its results counters.
A search on the same results string at Bing returned 15 relevant results; 4 of the 19 actually returned are on other topics. Only one, a section in a blog entry at the Baltimore Sun, can be considered a form of establishment press coverage.
If a Republican- or conservative-driven policy caused such havoc at an historically black college, we'd hear about it for weeks.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
