College students on the brink of making their own health care decisions, choices that they will likely live with for years, are a public that stands to be affected by any reform being proposed in Washington, D.C. So what do University of Missouri-St. Louis students know about the various proposals currently being debated in Congress, and what are their opinions on the matter?

Erin Richey, sophomore, criminology, who has a parent that works for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, said, “I don’t think that politicians [in either party] seem to know what they’re talking about, because specialists on health care and economics and other areas have different recommendations from what both sides are saying.”

When asked what came to mind when she thought of the current reform bill, Richey named public insurance as the first component that she associated with the bill.

Jonathan Meany, junior, engineering, also sees a public option (which was dropped from the bill in the Senate in December of last year) as the main issue being pushed in Washington.

“I’m not a fan of the bill. It’s the government sticking its fingers somewhere else they don’t belong,” Meany said.

Meany’s point of view is representative of Americans who have shown how weary they are of the government’s proposal in a national debate that has highlighted the fundamental partisan disagreement about where personal freedom and responsibility starts and the government’s responsibility to take care of people stops.

It is often expressed, even by detractors to health care reform, that both parties are willing to admit that we need to reform health care. Currently, 30 million Americans are without health care and more people are losing coverage every day during this strenuous economic climate.

When asked how many uninsured Americans they thought existed, Richey guessed 13 percent, and Meany said, “It’s in the millions.” Meany also guessed the U.S.’s current ranking by the World Health Organization as “in the top five, maybe number one”.

The World Health Organization’s ranking of the United States’ health care system is in fact No. 37, just two steps above Cuba and far below Columbia (No. 22), Iceland (No. 15), and even well below other large nations like the United Kingdom (No. 18).

Still, when one notes that this, the most recent ranking, is from the year 2000, it illuminates the complicated nature of a debate in which evidence on both sides of the aisle, no matter how compelling, is often itself debatable, a sad reality faced every day by both the millions of sick and uninsured, and the millions of hardworking insured citizens who pay the bill at the end of the day.

But the issue is a broad and hotly contested one, and both proponents and detractors to White House’s proposed changes have worked double-time to bring up equally compelling evidence, case studies, and other facts to support their case.

President Obama outlined the key components of the health care reform that the White House would like to see enacted in a September 2009 address to the joint session of Congress. Obama broke down these specific reforms, which can be found at Healthcarereform.gov.

First, the president stated that reform, in his mind, should “build on what works and fix what doesn’t,” rather than starting over from scratch. Second, he said that the hundreds of millions of Americans who have health care and do not want to change it will not be affected, and can keep their current plans. “Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have,” Obama said.

With this plan there would be an added emphasis on prevention, which will require insurance companies to completely cover routine preventative checkup items such as mammograms. In addition, President Obama called for new, broad, low-cost government-based health care, the so-called “public option” marketed by the president as a way for everyone to have the same health care that Congress gets. A later-dubbed “personal mandate” will require all individuals to have, at very least, the new low-cost health care, in the same manner that states currently require everyone to have automotive insurance.

There is a movement to pay for this vast reform primarily with funds gained through the reform itself—the cutting of waste and fraud that is pervasive throughout our current system. And whether or not any of the president’s suggestions will make it into the bill he will sign into law remains to be seen.