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Campuses offer ‘awesome’
medical care at rising prices
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CARBONDALE, Ill. – After a week of it, Ryan Devine was fed up to here with head and chest congestion. So first thing Monday, he was among dozens of supplicants ringing phones off the hook, seeking doctor appointments for flu-like symptoms, minor injuries, emergency contraception, urinary tract infections, etc.
Devine got right through – and in. By midmorning, he was on his way with a prescription for 'the pink stuff,' which he promptly filled at the pharmacy just across the street from the doctor's office.
He pronounced the doctor 'very pleasant' and the service, as always, 'awesome' in its efficiency and low price, just a few dollars out of pocket.
It didn't immediately dawn on him that he had also paid for this with a $143-a-semester health care fee on his bill from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he is a senior. All SIUC students must pay that fee and buy extended-care insurance through the university for $134 a semester if they don't already have it.
That's small change in light of a four-digit tuition bill there but yet another extra cost of going to college, and not just at SIUC.
Dr. Richard P. Keeling, a college-health consultant based in New York, estimates that upward of 90 percent of residential colleges and a growing number of others, including community colleges, have come to offer at least basic health services on campus to their students.
That's all to the good, he believes. With college students making up well over half of all U.S. 18-to-24-year olds, "increasingly, college health programs are influencing the health of a very large portion of that population," he says. Still, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, they?re the least insured age group in the nation, with 30 percent lacking coverage.
College health services tend to be self-supporting financially, billing the entire cost directly to students in the form of a health fee, health insurance or, as at SIUC, a combination of both. In whatever form, it's costing students more all the time.
As a rule, the more students pay, the more they get. At UMSL and SIUE, they get diagnosis and treatment of common ailments and injuries, confidential health and mental health advice, routine exams, prescriptions, shots and referrals to specialists. Otherwise, they're on their own for health care unless they have insurance, which both universities make available – but optional.
Health services are responding to the needs of a new generation of students with a new, more complex health profile. According to the National Mental Health Association, these students are especially prone to anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse and depression, which alone afflicts 10 percent of them.
As college health professionals are also quick to say, today's campus population also includes students with asthma, heart disease and cystic fibrosis – chronic ailments that in years past might have kept them from college altogether but that now require ongoing, on-campus medical management.
Ben Renkoski, a senior engineering major at the University of Missouri at Columbia, says that when they need care, today's students want "a place like their doctor back home, a place where they can go in and get what they need" quickly and not worry about bills. He says he found that – and healing ointment – at Mizzou's health service after roughing up a leg playing intramural football.
Tom Syre, an associate professor of health services administration at James Madison University in Virginia, also uses the recreation center analogy when talking about the growth of campus health care. Today's college students just "want to be pampered," he says, and colleges are reacting by taking back the parental roles they cast off a generation ago.
While conceding that college health care has served his own children well, he frets that the money going into it might be better spent on "the hiring of professionals in the classrooms."
Though colleges never put it to their students as that kind of either-or choice, some seek student approval before raising health fees. The sell is usually easy, with students happily deciding to tax themselves for more and better care.
Susan C. Thomson
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
