UMass Students Rally Against Health Costs
July 21, 2011 – 5:21 amAMHERST – Students who get their health insurance through the University of Massachusetts Amherst will have to foot some of the bill for off-campus visits to specialists under a new plan that came under fire at a downtown rally Friday afternoon.
The changes will require students to pay 15 percent of the cost – up to a $5,000 cap – of specialty care and other services not received at the campus health center.
The “co-insurance” plan means that students who need orthopedics or gynecological and obstetrics services, for example, that are not offered through the campus center will be required to go to off-campus providers and, for the first time, pay out-of-pocket costs for those visits.
The current student health insurance plan, or SHIP, pays the full cost of visits to off-campus specialists, as long as students choose from doctors on a preferred list.
The plan, scheduled to take effect Aug. 1, also includes a $50 increase in the deductible to $250.
Student leaders argue that the changes aren’t fair for students who already struggle to make ends meet, nor were they given a chance to weigh in on the issue before the changes were announced. They say the new plan will harm women, low-income earners and others who need more than the routine services provided at the campus health center.
Graduate students who are members of the Graduate Employee Organization UAW Local are most vocal opponents of the change. They are petitioning campus decision-makers and legislators and on Friday held rallies in Amherst, Northampton and Cambridge, where a similar measure is being proposed at the UMass Dartmouth campus. The Amherst rally drew around 60 people.
UMass Amherst spokesman Daniel Fitzgibbons said the university’s health center, like many medical facilities across the country, has been dealing with increased health costs for many years.
The center receives no operating funds and is self-sustaining, meaning that its money comes from insurance company payments and student fees – all students pay a $654 annual fee to use the center’s services, a fee that has remained the same for five years.
Given that the health center ran a half-million deficit last year, university officials said the center couldn’t continue to subsidize full coverage for the 5,800 students on SHIP.
“This is about high quality care for students and continuing to maintain financial stability at UHS,” said Fitzgibbons. “Being $500,000 in the hole last year is a considerable hurdle to continue to provide this.”
The move is also being made to keep premiums affordable, he said. If UMass had retained its 100 percent coverage, premiums would have gone up by about 30 percent, said Fitzgibbons. The new plan keeps the premium hike to 17 percent.
That means undergraduate students who choose to buy insurance through the university will pay $2,776 next year, up from $2,371. A family plan is rising from $6,288 to $7,374.
“We had to bear in mind not only that we wanted students to have to share the costs and that we didn’t want to run a deficit, but also that we wanted to keep premiums low,” he said.
All students are required to have health insurance under state law. Fitzgibbons said about three-fourths of UMass students are covered through non-campus plans. Those students waive the campus plan and either stay on their parents’ plan or obtain health insurance through the Massachusetts Health Connector’s young adult programs.
The remaining one-fourth, or about 5,800, of students enroll in SHIP. Of that total, 3,000 are undergraduates, 2,260 are unionized graduate students and nearly 500 non-GEO graduate students.
Those students will still be able to get full coverage for all of the routine services offered at the health center. No services are being cut, said Fitzgibbons.
Meanwhile, graduate students who are members of the union and on an individual plan pay 5 percent of the costs of the annual premium, or $138.80, and 5 percent of the annual health fee, for a total of about $171. Their departments pay the remaining 95 percent of both charges, which currently are $3,258 per student.
While university officials say the new plan is still a good deal for graduate students, many of those students who attended Friday’s rallies expressed concern with the changes.
Jeremy Wolf, a graduate student and the union’s grievance coordinator, said he had problems both with the plan itself and with the process through which it was crafted.
He said a $5,000 hit for a graduate student who makes $15,000 is significant, and that many in the union would have seriously considered paying the additional premium costs instead. That would have been about $400 a year.
“That’s not nothing, but it’s better than $5,000,” he said. “But nobody asked us … we never had an opportunity to talk to our members and to talk to the administration about possibilities.”
Anna Curtis, a graduate student in sociology and union member, said the plan changes will be especially harmful to women and their family members who need ob-gyn care beyond routine services.
“For me, the gender issue is one of the most glaring issues here,” Curtis said.
Additionally, Curtis said health insurance has been one of the few perks UMass has been able to use to attract graduate students to campus, Curtis said. The full coverage plan is better than plans at other universities, and many graduate students choose to come here for that reason.
“We use the plan to pull people in,” she said.
One such student is Shaimaa Moustafa, an international student from Egypt who said the health insurance plan was a big part of her decision to come to UMass to study. Had she known about the health insurance change sooner, the family of three might have made a different decision, she said.
“It came suddenly,” she said. “The health insurance plan is one of the most attractive things.”
Tags: student health insurance