I want to hesitate in coming down too hard on The Daily Collegian’s article on health insurance and students.  Health journalism is tough.  There are very complex issues, and I’ve seen people with a lot more experience get things wrong.  I’m going to focus on trying to clarify a few issues.

First, the article starts with a predictable and fact-free sentence on the “severe criticism” and “flaw” of Obamacare.  It’s not a flaw.  The fundamental focus of the changes in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is to ensure that both individuals and employers either make provisions for their health care needs through insurance or face a penalty to enable those costs to be paid if they do suffer an accident, injury or need for health care.  By preventing free riders, the law prevents individuals and employers from passing the buck on to someone else. Under the past system, costs of the uninsured were either paid by taxpayers or were built into the bill of those individuals who had insurance.  That’s fundamentally unfair.

So, the requirement that universities offer the same protection to student employees that they do to other employees is a logical application of that basic design principle, not a flaw.  Substitute almost any other word other than “student” there–allow universities not to have to offer insurance to Hispanic employees or female employees or older employees?  That’s absurd.  Why in the world should an employer be allowed to deny students the opportunity to purchase insurance, simply because they are students? Student employees should be given the exact same opportunities as all other employees.

The article raises the specter of job cuts, but offers no substantive evidence of that impact. The law only requires employers to offer insurance to employees who work 30 or more hours per week.  Nationwide, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, fewer than 7 percent of full-time students work 35 or more hours, and that includes students who work at employers other than the university where they study (about 38 percent of part-time students work 35 or more hours). With about 80 percent of Penn State’s students being full-time students, this means the law applies, at most, to 10-15 percent of students.  And that’s under the unreasonable assumption that every single one of those students working 30+ hours is working all of those hours with Penn State as their employer.

In addition to failing to provide the context or data for the insurance requirement and its impact on jobs, the article mentions the taxes and penalties of the law, but ignores its key contributions.  While it does mention the new benefits that insurers are required to provide, it does not direct attention to the recent data on costs and insurance coverage.

As has been widely noted, the past 4 years have been marked by an incredibly low rate of health care cost growth, despite the taxes, penalties, and other features of the Affordable Care Act.  While the causal link between the law and the slow growth is still uncertain, focusing solely on the taxes and penalties without addressing the potential that the law is having a real and substantive impact on slowing health care cost growth is exceedingly misleading.

But, even that is not the biggest problem with the article.  No, the biggest problem is its failure to even mention the 2 most important numbers for students: 28 and 18.

In 2010, 28 percent of young people age 18 to 24 were uninsured.

In 2014–because of the expansion of coverage through parental insurance plans, the Medicaid expansions in many states, and the availability of subsidized health insurance through the state and federal exchanges–just 18 percent of young people were uninsured.

This unprecedented increase–nearly 3.5 million more young people with health insurance–is what ought to be front page news at The Collegian and elsewhere.