The current economic climate has forced school to cut costs everywhere, including hiring freezes. However, few people realize just how badly these budget cuts affect the student health care provided at universities. The budget cuts are being passed straight down to the students, which is drastically increasing the cost of student healthcare. It is even affecting the staffing of student health centers on many campuses. At the University of Maryland at College Park the hiring freeze has caused the school to go without a psychologist, which is arguably one of the most important positions for health care on a college campus. Jon Englund author for InsideHigherEd.com, noted that one way to prevent this was for schools to start accepting more health insurance plans that students may already have from their parents. In fact Ohio University gained so much extra revenue from billing insurance company that instead of having a deficit they are now ready to expand their facilitates. They are even planning to hire more psychologists and increase the hours of the health center. This is just one solution to the problem ever increasing costs, but it is unacceptable to allow health care costs for students to increase so much. Most students are completely unaware of the fact that health care in college may be so expensive, and as a result they are very surprised when they find out how much it will cost them to be treated some even forgoing appointments to save money. Regardless of what solution is found it is clear that one is required because it is entirely unacceptable to allow students to skip treatment to save money.
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