The new policy will require students to fill out a form stating if they have insurance, MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon said. This gives MSU the opportunity to monitor students’ insurance statuses and help students figure out if insurance costs are expendable to financial aid under federal law, thus helping students receive insurance that otherwise might go unprotected.

The policy change comes after the Michigan Legislature placed budget funding restrictions on the higher education budget for universities that mandated students purchase health care.

When the issue of the university’s health insurance mandate came before ASMSU’s General Assembly, it was divisive and hotly debated amongst the representatives, but the assembly voted in February to support the university’s student health insurance requirement, said Dylan Miller, political theory and constitutional democracy senior and ASMSU Vice Chairperson for Governmental Affairs.

“In the interim, we are in the process of determining exactly how this policy is going to play out and how students are going to be affected by it,” Miller said. “Ultimately, complying with the state’s requirements was necessary for the university to keep tuition increases capped 3.5 percent given that state funding is still a critical component of the overall budget.”

In spring 2012 when students had to purchase health care, after being alerted of the potential charge in fall 2011, many Michigan legislators were up in arms over students being forced to buy MSU’s $1,505-per-year Aetna insurance plan.

Some critics of the mandate believed it infringed upon the rights of students to choose if they wanted to purchase health care, as the charge automatically was added to students’ bills if they did not provide evidence of having insurance.

Members of the Michigan House of Representatives Appropriations Committee, including Reps. Bob Genetski, R-Saugatuck, and Kevin Cotter, R-Mount Pleasant, opposed the mandate and have been vocal about its financial inconvenience to students.

Genetski said students should have had more of a voice last year when the university was discussing the insurance mandate.

“For a parent who isn’t fortunate to have health insurance, (this would) tack on a $1,500 fee to tuition bills whether or not they can afford it,” he said in a previous interview.

When the higher education budget, which has yet to be signed by Gov. Rick Snyder, was approved by the Michigan Legislature at the beginning of June, one of the eligibility guidelines for universities to receive funding from the state was that the university could not require students to have health insurance.

MSU was the only public university with a policy requiring students to purchase health insurance.
Simon is hopeful the new phrasing of the insurance requirements will put MSU in line to receive the $3.4 million allocated to it in the state’s higher education budget.

“All students are required to fill out the form and they may check a box that indicates that they do not want and understand the risk of not having insurance, because unlike other places, we do not have a relationship with a hospital that would permit us to write those off,” Simon said.