Debate is still heated nearly two weeks after President Obama signed the bill for turning his plans for health care reform into law.
Across campus, students and professors are discussing the effects this new law could have, both on the younger generation, and on the country as a whole.
Daniel Ramos, a 22-year-old UCSU tri-executive and senior majoring in sociology and Spanish, said that there are some specific provisions in the law that will directly affect students.
“Young people will be allowed to stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26,” Ramos said. “[Which is] really important, especially for students when they’re transitioning out of higher education and looking for a job, because there’s usually a period of time when they’re uninsured.”
Dayna Matthew, a professor and associate dean in the CU Law School, commented on the benefits of the law.
“The system we had before this reform was so totally broken and heading our country for an economic catastrophe,” Matthew said. “Had we not done this, we would have left young people a legacy of catastrophic proportions.”
Matthew said that the law will ultimately decrease the deficit and lower the overall cost of health care over time.
“This bill increases, by 32 million, the number of people who have access to health insurance,” Matthew said. “Before this bill, those people stayed sick and didn’t go get health care until they were sick enough to go to the emergency room. That cost a fortune. And that was one of the reasons the health care system was so expensive.”
The debate over cost is a major point of contention in discussions about the health care reform.
While people do argue that a greater implementation of preventative health care will eventually reduce the cost, others bring up the point that cost will increase as health care is provided for those who were previously uninsured.
Hank Brown, a former Republican U.S. Senator from Colorado, former CU president emeritus and recently retired CU-Boulder political science professor, said that if the law simply concentrated on people who couldn’t afford health care, then it would be less controversial and less expensive.
“In the past we’ve focused our programs on helping people who were financially unable to help themselves,” Brown said. “This has the government take over a function where people are able to pay for it themselves. It’s a dramatic departure from our history of self-reliance.”
This topic of self-reliance and government intervention is another issue surrounding the new law.
Mark Grimaldi, a 22-year-old senior accounting major, said that while he thinks it’s a good idea to try to reform health care, he believes the ways in which it’s being done are misguided.
“It’s slightly un-American to have the government tell people that they have to have health insurance,” Grimaldi said. “Some people don’t want it, and go their whole life without ever needing it. It’s very undemocratic to make people just do it.”
Eric Bernstein, a 21-year-old political science major, said that he was glad to see the new law passed, but that he’s not exactly sure how he feels about the government intervention debate.
“I don’t fear that the government is going to make policies that are overly controlling, but I also don’t know how necessary it was to have a mandate,” Bernstein said.
Ramos maintained that this law is incredibly important for students to pay attention to.
“I think one of the hard things for students specifically about health care is that a lot of students say ‘I’m not sick, I don’t have a disease, I don’t need to worry about health care,’” Ramos said. “This younger generation is going to be defining exactly the way some of these programs should be working.”
Contact CU Independent staff writer Kaely Moore at Kaely.moore@colorado.edu.
