Check out the lastest viewpoint written about the problems of health care delivery, insurance, and
funding at the University Text provided below too.
As students we get the amazing opportunity to think, to write, to
study, to argue, and live what has been called the "life of the mind." Some
of us pay dearly to be here, some of us are paid handsomely to be here,
some of us are the partners and children of students here. But no matter
how we find ourselves here, a fundamental right to be healthy binds us
together as a university community. While healthcare fights to take top
billing in the ongoing presidential race, the issue has never been more
vital and more pressing here at the University of Chicago.
In the first week of March, the Student Health Insurance Review Committee
(SHIRC) presented their recommendation of health insurance providers to the
campus community at a serious of town hall meetings. The discussions were
informative, occasionally tense, and illustrative of just how important
health insurance provision and funding is for everyone at the university.
This point was made especially by members of Save our Student Health
Insurance (SOS)HI, a student group dedicated health care issues, but by
virtually every other student present as well.
The University requires all students to carry health insurance coverage. To
this end, they provide an option for us to buy into a group plan. For many,
especially international students, the families of students, and persons
with pre-existing conditions, this is the only insurance available to us.
It is literally a life line. This plan, however, is not only rather
expensive (easily a quarter or third of a graduate students annual income),
but has been bordering on the laughable in terms of coverage over recent
years.
Following the dismantling of a self-insured system administered and funded
by the University in the face of dramatically rising costs, the University
has gone about finding an outside insurance provider to meet the student
population's needs of health insurance. This is no easy task, and SHIRC has
taken on the impossible and thankless task of selecting a provider and a
plan that provides necessary coverage at an affordable price. That
committee is constrained, however, by not only the nation wide increases in
health care costs, but by an administrative constraint placed on their
mission: they cannot directly address questions of how students are
expected to pay for the very coverage they are required to carry.
The University's decentralized bureaucracy has made it de-facto policy to
split questions of provision and funding. The excellent presentations this
past week at the town hall meetings tried to concern themselves solely with
the provision of health insurance. The recommendation detailed 1) the
insurance company being recommended to the University as its provider and
2) the benefits that may or may not be included in that plan to determine a
final premium price. These are deeply important issues, yes, but for those
of us live on fixed incomes determined largely by the university, for those
of us who pay dearly in tuition fees already, for those of us who rely on
their partner's student status to get coverage, concerns about provision
and benefits cannot be separated from the question of how are we to pay for
that coverage? It should not be surprising that the question which came up
again and again during these town hall meetings was "How are we supposed to
pay for this?
The University, the College, our Divisions, and our Departments need to
hear from us that we can't talk about health insurance without talking
about funding. Questions about specific kinds of coverage are important,
but when the price of basic health insurance puts many of us below the
poverty line ($9,573 a single childless person, according to the 2003 US
Census figures), then it should not be surprising that we are concerned
less with the differences between basic and comprehensive plans, between
the pros and cons of out of pocket expenses, deductibles, or out-patient
surgery allotments, but with the simple price tag. Until the University
addresses basic questions of funding, questions of provision pale in
comparison.
The degree to which we think of ourselves as a community of colleagues,
scholars, and friends is a defining characteristic of what makes this
university so amazing. If we let ourselves be atomistic agents, then we
undermine not only our own ability to function as a group, but we undermine
the very closeness and solidarity that makes this university so
exceptional.
o matter what your own funding status is, no matter what insurance policy
you carry, fighting for affordable health care is deeply important to each
of us, to our departmental communities, and the university as a whole. We
are all lucky enough to live the "life of the mind" or something close to
it. The most basic prerequisite for that life, however, is our health, not
only individually, but collectively. We owe it to ourselves and to our
community to ensure that each of us has adequate and affordable health
care. The University administration owes us some real options for how to
get there.
The work of the SHIRC (http://shirc.uchicago.edu/) is to be commended.
Groups like Save our Student Health Insurance
(/soshi.htm) and any other student organizations
are vital if we are to press the University to take health insurance
funding seriously and to ensure the basic right to healthcare for every
student, scholar, worker, parent, child, and human being connected to this
amazing institution.
We are holding a meeting tomorrow at 6:00 PM Cobb Hall 304. Please come!
I am a "survivor" of the UC approach to graduate student health insurance,
I spent 8 years in Chicago as doctoral students at SSA (with a dependent child for the last 2).
I want mainly to laud your organizing efforts -- and can only hope that
many students show up at this meeting. I also wanted to add the additional
info not reflected in your data summary (but which you may already have)
that SSA students as part of their initial 4-year stipend do get basic
health insurance and health fee cost "waivers," and thereafter can obtain
"waivers" for basic-only insurance (when they otherwise wouldn't get any
coverage from the school) by TAing or RAing. Something that's long felt
particularly gross to SSA students and probably those elsewhere, too, is
that there are numerous cases when a doctoral student obtains multiple
waivers for the same time period that go financially
unrecognized/unreimbursed by the school. To try to illustrate, one year I
got an SSA dissertation grant that covered (basic) health insurance & fees
all year, and then TA'd for two quarters, work which separately earns me
coverage -- so the school had to pay for only one waiver for me across the
year even though for each of 2 terms I'd technically earned 2 (for those 2
doubled-up quarters). But in these circumstances, even though they're
saving lots of money (by having a grantee also serve as teaching assistant),
the school won't at least bump the student to comprehensive coverage --
something they'd still save money doing. The point of all of this excessive
detail is that in describing their offering of basic insurance coverage to
us, they say it's "real money"; but when we push them to refund us some of
that money, or else improve our benefits, when we double-up our waivers
through double-duty, it's "not real money.
Best of Luck!
We would like to announce a few words about what happened at the SHIRC
meeting today.
Overall we have good news to report:
Thanks to SOSHI's efforts it looks as if there will be a meeting with the
Provost of the University and SOSHI representatives soon to discuss funding
health insurance for all graduate students.
We will soon announce the date for a SOSHI meeting
At that meeting we hope to:
1) Decide who goes to the meeting with the Provost and what issues everyone wants addressed by the Provost;
2) We also want to come up with a governance structure for SOSHI. T
Please still go to a Town Hall meeting on Thursday or Friday if you have yet to go.
There are going to be some very important decisions made about things like
deductibles, outpatient surgery, pre-existing condtions, etc. that will
certainly change the way the plan will be administered next year.
We also would like to mention that Robin Wagner and Dr. Sarah Van Orman were
very gracious, patient, and informative about this proposed plan and answering
student questions.
Hi! I've been abroad all year but have been following your activities with great interest and recently joined your mailing list. As if the cost of insurance and quality of medical care and customer service isn't already bad enough, I'm married
to someone in my own department (which funds almost no one, including the two of us!) and we are faced with having to pay full price for the both of us. And if that weren't bad enough, we have to travel abroad to a lot to do our research, and
I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the university offers us no reasonable insurance option on that account. Nevermind that the plan makes it impossible, unless you're a millionaire, to get the prescription drugs you need before you go
(purchasing them abroad isn't always an option, depending on where you're travelling). Anyway, I just wanted to give you an idea of our particular circumstances as you attend the Town Hall meetings. I'd be there alongside you if I could. And I do hope you'll be active during the summer...my husband and I will be in Chicago and would love to help out in any way we
can. Thanks for all your hard work, and good luck!