Jonathan Oberlander, a UNC professor in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, said the details of the ACA repeal are unclear.
“We’re at the beginning of the end of the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “Certainly they’ll repeal major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, but when they do that, exactly what they do and what they replace it with, we don’t know.”
Oberlander said that women’s health care rights are vulnerable in the wake of an ACA repeal.
“The ACA has protections that are important to women’s health, and those protections are certainly vulnerable, and some of them are likely to be repealed,” Oberlander said.
UNC sophomore Carley West recently began paying for her own insurance, and she said she wasn’t sure if her plan would change under the Trump administration — so she switched from birth control to an IUD.
“I wasn’t sure if my policy would pay for my birth control, and I was afraid of how the election might affect my ability to get access to the pills,” West said in a Facebook message.
Ken Pittman, director of UNC Campus Health Services, said the ACA repeal will not affect its offerings, but might change what services are covered by insurance plans.
He said the best thing students can do is familiarize themselves with their insurance coverage.