Call it a dry run for ObamaCare.  According to the advocacy group Students for Life, the state  of North Carolina has created a back-door requirement that will force every uninsured student to pay for abortions.  A new rule established by the Board of Governors requires every student attending its state-run universities and colleges to carry health insurance; if a student doesn’t have insurance, they will have to purchase it through the school.  That plan funds abortions, which puts every uninsured student in the position of paying for them out of his or her own pocket:

Students for Life of America has discovered that this fall the North Carolina Board of Governors is requiring all students who are enrolled in a University of North Carolina public institution to have health insurance.

Students who do not already have private health insurance are required to buy a state selected policy from Pearce & Pearce, Inc. This mandated policy covers up to $500 toward elective abortions and has 80% PPO coverage for elective abortions.

The Pearce & Pearce policy costs students $744 per year or $375 per semester. The State of North Carolina will not be paying into the policy; rather, the students who are required to purchase the insurance will be required to pay the entire cost.

As a result, North Carolina students will be forced to pay for elective abortions, regardless of their personal views on the issue.

Sarah Hardin, President of North Carolina State University’s Students for Life group was shocked at the news: “When I learned a week ago that this mandatory health coverage included the coverage of an elective abortion, I was dumbfounded.  As a pro-life student at NC State, I am dismayed that my classmates will not only be forced to purchase health insurance, but will also be forced to pay into a pool that will go to aborting the children of other North Carolina students.”

Like Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner, I suspect that this won’t last long, if indeed this is what has happened.  The entire idea of requiring comprehensive health insurance as a prerequisite for attendance at school smacks of nanny-statism anyway.  What’s the justification for a state-run school to require health insurance?  The overwhelming majority of students will be adults and responsible for their own health care; the minors probably have coverage through their parents anyway.

Buying comprehensive plans like the (apparently) mandated policy makes almost no sense at all for healthy young adults, either.  They would be better advised to buy catastrophic health insurance at much lower rates and pay out of pocket for incidental expenses.  At $774 per year, students will have spent as much as they would for four or five comprehensive physical exams with labs, when most of them may decide to get one check-up during the year.  Of course, that’s the argument against ObamaCare too, and too few people paid attention to the math to have it prevail this year.

We don’t yet have a response from the NCBoG, but if this is true, I suspect that a second plan sans abortion services will be made available for students to select, and probably soon.  Somehow, I doubt that saner counsel will prevail and remove this non-academic prerequisite altogether.