I’m sure that at some point all students at Penn State have encountered an illness throughout the school year. This could range from anything as basic as a cold, to something more serious such as Mono. When faced with an illness, everyone takes a different approach. Some students choose to forgo medical treatment and instead hope the illness will go away on its own. Other students seek medical treatment, and at Penn State this comes in the form of UHS. People have had varying levels of success with the UHS. Some have found it to be highly successful, and others have found it to be a waste of time. At the second deliberation I attended, these kinds of opinions were discussed. The focus was to deliberate upon the current state of our healthcare system at Penn State and what could be done to improve it.
The first approach discussed was community and fairness when it comes to healthcare. Almost immediately, this brought up the topic of health insurance. The overarching questions was, “Should all students be required to have health insurance?” Health insurance, while extremely beneficial in the long run, can be a huge cost to students; sometimes completely unaffordable. The general consensus about health insurance was that all students should be required to have it because, as I learned tonight, whenever a student who is uninsured needs medical treatment, it is paid for collectively by the student body. Everyone agreed that there should be an easy way for all students to have access to health insurance. The other topic discussed under this approach was whether or not students who have less severe illnesses should be refused at UHS. Most people believed that this was a bad idea because even if it would take up more of the doctors’ time, the students were clearly taking the initiative in getting their health checked which is a good precaution, even if it is for a minor illness.
The second approach that we talked about at this deliberation was self-reliance and responsibility. In other words, should healthy living be solely the responsibility of the individual students, or should the University work to promote good health? In general, most people thought that it was important for the students to work to better their lifestyles. This would not only improve their own health, but could have some positive effects on improving the health of others. There were mixed opinions about whether or not having the University jump start campaigns and programs about healthy living would reduce the number of people who would need treatment at UHS. On one hand, people felt that getting the University to promote incentives to go to the gym and eat healthy would make students play a more active role in their health. On the other hand, some students felt that by college, most lifestyles are already engrained and so trying to make someone who has unhealthy habits pick up healthy ones could be a challenge.
The final approach discussed was the current efficiency of the UHS. At this point in the deliberation, many people shared their personal experiences with UHS and we used these experiences to judge to current state of the system and to decide what could be improved upon. Most of the experiences shared were negative and so I thought the students running the deliberation did a good job of turning the discussion around to focus more on some of the positive aspects of UHS. The general consensus of the group was that the efficiency of the UHS should be improved, allowing the doctors to see more patients in a shorter amount of time. However, many also thought that the quality of the treatments and caregiving should not be sacrificed for efficiency. The students would rather wait for a longer period of time if it meant that other students were getting quality diagnoses and given correct dosages of medication.
All in all, I found this deliberation to be highly successful. Going into it, I knew very little about health insurance and the healthcare options at Penn State. I found this deliberation to be extremely helpful in getting me informed about health insurance which is extremely important, especially as I enter into adulthood. It was also interesting to hear people’s thoughts about the UHS since I had never been there and hadn’t heard much about it.
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