Obama's Healthcare Solution For All Leaves Students Without Healthcare, Or Paying Double

President Obama sold his hallmark legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare, as being a healthcare solution for everyone. It was supposed to solve the problem of the uninsured, especially younger adults.

Well, so much for that thought. News this week from the eastern edge of our state shows just how detrimental Obama's policies have been:

Faced with being forced to abandon its conscience while emptying its bank account, a Catholic university finds its students can't keep the health insurance they like as it becomes prohibitively expensive.

Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, finding itself at the nexus of cost and conscience regarding the demands and expenses imposed on it and other Catholic institutions by the onslaught of ObamaCare, has announced it will neither comply nor participate in the nationalization of health care and drop the health coverage it offers to its students.

While Franciscan University is grappling with how to deal with the Obama mandates that amount to nothing more than an assault on religious freedom (and are blatantly in violation of the U.S. Constitution), the bigger issues here is affordability. In Steubenville, student coverage under Obamacare was simply too expensive for the university to maintain:

Besides the contraception mandate, the school also cited a requirement to raise the maximum coverage to $100,000 for policyholders — causing the basic $600 cost of a student policy to double in the fall and to triple next year, university officials said.

Even in the best of cases, Obamacare is set to double the cost of student healthcare, placing a further burden on cash-strapped students, even if their particular university decides to keep offering it despite the increased costs. So while students are struggling to pay the costs of tuition, rent and books, Obamacare will double their rate on healthcare.

This is certainly a problem for Obama, but an even bigger one for Ohio's senior senator. If Sherrod Brown is really all that concerned about students facing doubling rates, perhaps he should have exercised his own vote against mandates that increase the costs of healthcare to young Ohioans.

Or maybe he's not exactly a “practice what you preach” sort of guy.