After passing 143-4 in the Texas House and 27-4 in the Texas Senate, Gov. Rick Perry vetoed a bill that would have required campus health centers to accept private health insurance.
In a statement, Perry said that the bill would not have benefited students nor health care centers at universities and would have been a burden on the centers themselves.
“[The bill] would likely increase health service costs for college students and their families without increasing the level of service or care,” Perry said. “Student health centers would need to increase staff or contract this service to a third-party administrator; either option would needlessly increase costs to students.”
Though visits to university health centers such as University Health Services at UT are relatively inexpensive, the bill would have mandated that the centers accept private insurance and collect fees through a third-party billing service.
The bill’s goal was to relieve the burden on the state to fund such visits and to transfer the costs to students’ under-used private insurance coverage, said Rep. Fred Brown, R-Bryan, who authored the bill.
“[The bill] represented a simple, common-sense solution to save millions in taxpayer funds without reducing services for the state’s public university students,” Brown said. “I am deeply disappointed with Governor Perry’s decision to veto this fiscally conscientious legislation.”
James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, said that Perry’s veto was misguided.
“I think it’s kind of baffling — the bill passed overwhelmingly in the Senate, and I think it’s a pretty straightforward issue,” Boyle said. “The vast majority of students have health insurance, and student health centers don’t accept that insurance for payment. The health care most students are used to receiving the first 18 years of their life is not available to them when they get to school, and that really doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
