  We study the relationship between universal effects and the Coulomb
interaction. Here, we present our approach and a first illustrative example.
  Understanding the relationship of universality and the Coulomb interaction is
important for weakly bound nuclear few-body systems. The example nucleus we
study is the excited state of $^{17}$F which we model as a proton and an
$^{16}$O core. We use a Gaussian potential to represent short-range forces
together with a Coulomb potential. Our calculation uses the Gaussian Expansion
Method (GEM), which is a variational method well-suited to our problem. We find
that we need to choose the range of the Gaussian potential in addition to the
potential strength that reproduces the right scattering length. We propose to
fit the range of the Gaussian potential such that the effective range is
reproduced. We show that this approach leads to consistent results for
$^{17}$F.
