UGA needs to reconsider health insurance plan for graduate students : KRISTIN BOUDREAU
An open letter to University President Michael Adams and members of the Georgia Assembly Higher Education Committee:
Dear President Adams and Assembly members:
I was dismayed to learn that UGA's graduate student health insurance has changed to set the out-of-pocket individual contribution at $10,000 per year. The issue is a personal one for me, because one of the students who already knows she will be affected is Nicole Camastra, an outstanding graduate student from the English Department, where until recently I served as graduate coordinator.
When I took on the role of graduate coordinator in 2006, the [UGA] Graduate School was justifiably proud of its new graduate student health insurance coverage. Although they acknowledged that the policy was far from perfect, they were committed to offering the best coverage they could afford in the hope that it could be strengthened in future years. As a person responsible for student recruitment, I can tell you that it made a difference to the people who decided to enroll - and that its limitations sometimes accounted for our having lost strong applicants to other universities.
I was a young graduate student in 1989 when I fell ill and needed multiple (and expensive) tests and two rounds of surgery before being diagnosed with a chronic disease. My University-sponsored health insurance took care of all but the most trivial costs for these treatments. If I had had the health insurance that UGA graduate students now carry, I would have dropped out of graduate school and taken a job (and loans) to pay my medical bills.
Nicole Camastra is a talented graduate student whose intelligence and passion are urgently needed in her field of study. She has finished her coursework and exams and is writing her dissertation. After having established herself as a gifted teacher and scholar, it would be tragic if she had to abandon her studies because of burdensome medical bills.
I read in the [Aug. 19 edition of The Red & Black] that Tom Gausvik, the associate vice president for human resources, explained that the change will "affect so few students within the plan." Taken out of context, his point appears to be meant as reassurance to all graduate students that most of them will not suffer from the much higher out-of-pocket limit. I hope that's not how he meant his remark.
Most students, to be sure, will not be affected as Nicole will be. But it's an astonishing thing for a human resources director to say, because it seems to imply that graduate students should take comfort in the fact that they belong to a relatively young and healthy population; the odds are they will never fall gravely ill. With this logic, Nicole and her fellow graduate students might be well advised to do without health insurance altogether; they can always declare bankruptcy to pay their bills if those bills get out of hand.
That's about where these students are left under the new plan, but they're also responsible for premiums and 20 percent co-pays before the $10,000 annual limit. As I say, I hope the lost context of this remark puts it in a different light.
The state of Georgia and UGA administration face an unprecedented fiscal crisis. Nobody understands that more than graduate students, who have experienced deep cuts to the instructional budget and whose teaching loads (and stipends) have fluctuated with little warning as departments have had to respond to a disheartening series of budget cuts.
But the change in health insurance is out of all proportion to the other cuts being implemented across campus and across the state; the difference between an annual out-of-pocket cost of $2,500 and $10,000 (for a person earning $14,000 annually as a teaching assistant and already relying on significant loans to make ends meet) is the difference between just barely surviving and having to abandon a career path that might be built on a seven or eight-year investment. For the sake of those individuals who will face catastrophic illness or accident, and for the sake of those faculty who have spent years building excellent graduate programs with national recognition, I beg you to reconsider the new health insurance plan.
