A decision by the provincial Progressive Conservative government this week will have an impact on two local post-secondary schools. The province announced it will stop covering the health care costs of international students, a measure that was introduced by the former NDP government in 2012. Rob Reimer, President of Steinbach Bible College, says the change will affect some of their students.

Providence University College"There will be a couple of students, not many, but a few students where it will impact them and they'll have to take a look for next year, what that'll mean as far as getting health insurance. We'll be looking to see what may best benefit our international students and how we can help them out with that."

Reimer says prior to 2012, SBC arranged a private healthcare insurance package that students could buy and they may look at something similar for this fall.

Meanwhile, Debi Van Duin is the International Student Services Coordinator at Providence University/College at Otterburne. She says they have around 120 international students who will be impacted by the announcement.

"This will have a huge impact at Providence because we have a lot of international students, probably anywhere from a quarter of students upwards are international. A lot of them are families and so taking that away will make a huge difference to them and to us."

Van Duin says they too are looking into setting up a private health insurance package that students could purchase. But
she notes many of them are poor and will struggle to handle the additional cost, especially the families.

"Their kids can't go to school here without health care (coverage), you know there are lots of things. It's not like we can say; oh you're family can come and we'll just require the student to pay (for insurance). It's going to have to be their whole family. That's going to get pricey for a lot of our students, especially seminary students. Lots of our students come from very poor countries, it's a struggle for them. They work in the cafeteria here and are constantly struggling with financial things. I feel very strongly that we'll need to do something to help them."

The province expects to save $3.1 million a year by dropping universal health care for international students.