Wheaton College stopped providing health insurance for some students on 31 July, which will affect about 25% of the school’s 3,000 students, while still providing health care insurance for staff and faculty.
Wheaton College is one of the dozens of Christian non-profits and businesses that have argued that the Affordable Care Act, which requires that insurance plans provide birth control, is against their religious beliefs.
Heavy-handed government
‘What has brought us here is about student health insurance, but it’s bigger than student health insurance’, said Paul Chelsen, Wheaton’s vice president of student development. ‘What really breaks my heart is that there are real people that are affected by our decision. But if we don’t win this case, the implications down the road in terms of what the government will tell us what we can and cannot do will be significant.’
Also under the act, religious non-profits are able to notify the government of their objections and the government will then direct insurers to provide birth control coverage in a separate policy that the nonprofit would not pay for.
Wheaton College officials have argued that even that compromise makes them complicit in helping students obtain birth control. ‘The reason why protecting that case is so important is that basically the government is telling us we have to offer something that we find morally objectionable’, Chelsen said. For students affected by the change, the college is setting aside money to help students pay for health care.
