ASUU’S Student Advocacy Board joined up with the Hinckley Institute of Politics to sponsor a forum to help students understand and navigate the post-Affordable Care Act world of health insurance.
Jason Stevenson, a staff writer at Backpacker Magazine, spoke to about 60 students in the Hinckley caucus room on Tuesday to educate them about the types of benefits that will be available to them as the Affordable Care Act comes closer to being implemented.
The Act will make insurance more accessible to currently enrolled students. Utah has one of the highest percentages of uninsured residents in the United States, with 14.6 percent of Utahns uninsured.
Some students cannot afford health insurance, while others do not see the need for it. The Act offers catastrophic coverage to students who do not see the need to buy insurance. This plan is designed for emergency use for people under 30.
Braxton Dutson, a student in social work  and a member of the Student Advocacy Board, said the forum helped him understand the Act.
“I think this forum is so important for students because, at least for me, it cleared up a lot of hear-says. I’ve heard this about Obamacare and I got my questions answered,” he said.
To make the material widely available to students, organizers recorded the event.
“[We wanted to have] it recorded specifically for students who can’t make it. In order for everyone to get it, we’ve put it online at kuer.org and on the radio,” Dutson said. “We had roughly sixty to seventy students today, and that’s definitely not the 30,000 students. It affects all of us.”
Michael Kiley, who is studying medical laboratory sciences, felt the information was beneficial to students who were not sure about which insurance to get.
“It kind of gives you a run-down on where we’re going as far as a student’s insurance. Not a lot of people come here insured, and a lot of people come here uninsured,” Kiley said.
He felt Stevenson helped students understand insurance policies and start thinking about which insurance plan is best for them.
“It is just to make them more aware. I didn’t know the website, I didn’t know how to even go about it and I work in health care. Just getting general information on how to sign up is beneficial,” Kiley said.