This summer, Wheaton College in Illinois announced it will stop offering health insurance plans to students as part of its effort to avoid providing birth control coverage as required by the Affordable Care Act. According to The Chicago Tribune, this decision halts coverage for roughly a quarter of the college’s 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students, though it will not affect health care insurance for faculty and staff.
We wrote last week about the importance of health insurance for college students, praising the University’s latest effort to keep students covered. Given the cost of care, health insurance is practically a necessity in our country, and the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that most Americans purchase it makes access to coverage especially important. In this case, Wheaton allowed its religious stance — against providing birth control — to overwhelm the importance of higher education institutions providing coverage for their students.
What makes Wheaton’s decision more disheartening is that the school was not even being required to offer birth control. Wheaton was among the dozens of Christian nonprofits that argued the ACA’s requirement for birth control coverage was an assault on religious freedom in the 2012 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case — a case that removed the ACA’s mandate for corporations with religious objections. A compromise plan requires officials to notify the government of their religious objections and prompts the school’s insurance carrier to provide coverage directly to students. Wheaton refuses to partake in this plan because this violates the school’s religious beliefs. In 2012, the school filed a federal lawsuit and has not yet complied with the order, made easier by a temporary stay granted by the U.S. Supreme Court.
While Wheaton waits to hear whether it will have to notify the government of its objections should it offer health coverage, it has preemptively ended coverage for nearly one thousand students. To make matters worse, in 2010 Wheaton instituted a requirement that students enroll in or provide proof of comparable insurance every year — but now it has eliminated a resource to comply with that requirement.
While there is merit to the debate over religious exemptions to this mandate, Wheaton officials were not yet being forced to act against their religious beliefs. Moreover, they did not even attempt to grandfather students into their new policy, halting coverage immediately for students who probably expected to remain covered through their school as long as they remained enrolled.
Universities and colleges are not obligated to offer their students insurance, though it is certainly laudable for them to do so. But Wheaton has promised its students coverage — in fact, it has required it of them. Such a promise demonstrates a commitment to students’ well-being — a commitment this school has now severely compromised.
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