Plans begin for UC-wide insurance
By Flavia Casas
April 4, 2010 9:48 p.m.
For graduate students in six out of 10 University of California campuses, health care will be changing in more ways than just those outlined in Washington’s recent health care reform.
With planning and discussion going as far back as October 2007, the UC Office of the President issued a proposal earlier this year to generate a centralized health insurance program for its graduate students, said George Zamora, UCOP policy and program analyst.
As the health insurance policy currently stands, each Student Health Insurance Plan package differs from campus to campus. Because graduate health care is a greater and easier problem to deal with, UCOP is testing out the pooled plan at the graduate level before it considers applying the strategy to the undergraduate level.
For those campuses that signed on, which do not include Los Angeles, Berkeley, Irvine or Riverside, the plan will take effect in fall 2010, Zamora said. For UCLA, agreeing to the plan stimulated many queries.
“One of our concerns was that we have the lowest cost premiums with the highest benefits. Is UCLA going to lose out and have cuts to those things?” said Katharina Kircanski, former chair of the Student Health Advisory Committee.
The proposal, which originally stemmed from ideas at UC San Francisco and Santa Cruz, was presented by UCOP as a work in progress that aimed to stabilize premium costs and enhance the Graduate Student Health Insurance Plan benefits, said Jamal Madni, president of the Graduate Student Association.
A GSHIP Workgroup was created to address the cost of exponentially growing GSHIP premiums and the improvement of other areas, Zamora said.
Each UC was represented within both the scoring teams and the Cost Validation and Implementation Team to evaluate proposals and represent each campus’s individual concerns, Kircanski said.
Those universities that decided to opt out of the plan have no voting power within the Cost Validation and Implementation Team.
“It is currently in the process of … negotiating prices and benefits options with health insurance carriers,” Zamora said of the team’s activity.
Scoring teams made recommendations to the chancellor and executive vice chancellor, who made the final decision ““ which in UCLA’s case, was to not participate.
The UCOP consolidated plan would only regress the quality of UCLA’s current GSHIP and at a higher price, according to John Bollard, director of administrative services for the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center, and various graduate students involved in the process.
Kircanski, who served on UCLA’s GSHIP scoring team, and Madni, who represents UCLA in the Cost Validation and Implementation Team, both stressed the importance of maintaining UCLA’s high lifetime maximum, uncapped pharmacy benefits and dependent coverage ““ three features that failed to appear on the centralized plan.
To further confirm the importance of maintaining GSHIP at its current level, Madni said GSA performed a survey to measure graduate students’ satisfaction with the existing policy. An overwhelming majority not only said they were content with GSHIP, but that they would also oppose any increases in price or loss of benefits.
Madni said by pooling all of the existing plans into one, UCOP hoped a large group of buyers would induce insurance carriers to offer greater benefits at lower rates.
This would assist those campuses with less coverage and higher costs to provide their students with more for their money.
However, the process failed to play out the way administrators had envisioned it.
UC campuses Los Angeles, Berkeley, Irvine and Riverside roughly comprise about half of all graduate students within the UC, so when they chose to opt out, the proposal lost about 50 percent of its prospective buyers, Madni said.
“It’s a self-funded model, and the policy itself will take the responsibility of the risk. It’s not fully insured,” Madni said.
Currently, neither UCOP nor the UC Board of Regents have any power to mandate any of the UC campuses to join the pooled plan, but they are consistently putting pressure on those that opted not to join, Madni said.
UCLA could still choose to join the pooled plan, if not for the 2010-2011 year then for later years down the line. But for now, it will sit on the sidelines and wait for the finalized version to be released, which is expected in August.
