Health care changes create discussion

The year 2017 began with a controversial start. One example is Trump’s proposal to repeal Obamacare, which may come into effect soon. Some students and staff at Keene State are in conflict over the partial repeal of Obamacare. According to Associate Professor of Health Science Rebecca Brown, between 16 and 18 million people could be without healthcare next year.

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By 2020, Brown says 33 million could be left without healthcare. According to BBC News, the measure to draft a repeal legislation on Obamacare by Jan. 27 was passed in the House of Representatives 227 to 198.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, repealing Obamacare will cost about $350 billion over the course of a decade.

President Donald Trump recently said in an interview with the Washington Post that he is nearing completion of a plan on replacing Obamacare with something else that will take its place, although he was vague about the details of the plan.

According to the Director of the Center for Health and Wellness Christine Burke, repealing Obamacare could mean there won’t be any access free birth control. Burke says that while the repeal won’t have a major affect on the Center for Health and Wellness’ quality of healthcare, she anticipates that it will affect the number of students coming to the Wellness Center.

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“How I anticipate it will impact our students is that more students will be coming back to get their birth control here. If they no longer can get it for nothing, it may be less expensive to get it here than at the pharmacy,” said Burke.

KSC senior health science major Samantha Brown said she had concerns about the repeal and feels that it will affect her career. “It definitely makes me think about my future as a possible nurse or any job I do because that will definitely impact it. I think as a health science student and health conscious, it makes you think about what it’s going to be like.” said Brown.

Like Brown, first-year KSC student Katelynn Kaimi also has mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act repeal. Kaimi said that she felt they should have tweaked the ACA rather than repeal it. Kaimi said that the ACA helped with her grandfather’s healthcare.

“It definitely helped my parents when my grandfather had to go to into the hospital to deal with his cancer. We wouldn’t have been able to pay for it and he wouldn’t have lived as long as he had had it been the other way around,” said Kaimi.

Associate Professor Brown said that she personally knows some students who will lose their insurance because of the repeal, including some students with children.

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Like Kaimi, Brown felt that the best solution would be to tweak Obamacare rather than repeal it. “I always tell people healthcare in this country is a huge ship. You can’t turn it around real fast. We don’t have a healthcare system, we have a marketplace. If you look at healthcare around the world, you can see people have much better integrated systems,” said Brown, “There are much better ways to do this. The Affordable Care Act was working toward some of those things, which reduced costs and covered everybody. So how they are going to do that right now? I have no idea and they don’t either.”

Katherine Glosser can be contacted at kglosser@kscequinox.com