Univ. System rebids health insurance

In its last meeting Dec. 12, the Student Health Insurance Plan Committee (SHIP) decided to postpone the rebidding of the student healthcare plan for this year. The committee also decided to table the discussion on requiring mandatory insurance coverage for all students and proposed dropping the deductible until the re-bid process can be started.

Recently, however, despite an 11-0 vote, Beheruz N. Sethna, Interim Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Academic Officer, has been asked to re-bid the student health insurance plan for next year.

Pearce and Pearce Inc. (P&P) is responsible for the implementation and creation of the existing healthcare policy. The committee is interested in having P&P present statistics on the costs to domestic versus international students.

In addition, the committee would like to know the full impact of dropping the deductible from the plan on campuses that do not have a health center.

The committee had decided to hold off on making decisions on these issues due to a lack of data. According to the minutes from the last meeting the members of the committee were interested in having Tonya Lam, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, ask the providers of the existing policy questions regarding the current policies.

Also during the meeting, the committee listed the current problems with the P&P health insurance plan. According to the minutes of the meeting several concerns about the plan were noted.

For example, there were concerns presented about the current rules regarding appeals processes for students. This includes the issue of why waivers were denied to certain students in the first place. In addition P&P was supposed to have issued ID cards to the students under the health policy. Unfortunately due to issues in the way that the mail was addressed those cards were never delivered.

Finally, and perhaps most surprising, there have been approximately $1 million in claims filed, but according to the current data there has been no mention of any premiums collected by the parties that filed the claims.

All of this comes after the P&P plan has only been in effect since August.

For the last three years the status of the insurance plan has been in limbo as the debate over the correct course of action continues. Though the committee wanted to understand how the existing plan impacts domestic versus international students, a few theories have already surfaced within the meetings.

In the minutes of the December meeting, committee member and Tech's graduate student body president Mitch Keller expressed his thoughts about why international students are unhappy with the existing plan.

Tuesday, in an email to the Technique, Keller stated that Sethna's recent plan to re-bid the insurance is "going to segment the student population in response to the calls from the international education community in the state."

He went on to say that this change was "surprising and very disturbing."

Keller stated in his email that "Dr. Sethna's most recent action is a step backward that seeks to provide a small benefit to international students at a direct cost to our domestic students. This is by no means appropriate for a public university system in the United States."

Currently the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) is working with senior Tech officials to see if it would be possible to get Chancellor Erroll Davis to reverse Sethna's decision. If the SGA is unable to succeed in this regard they plan on making a recommendation to Institute President Wayne Clough and other research university presidents to seek a research university only health insurance plan that would allow Tech to retain its current plan's structure while at the same time allowing other schools within the University System of Georgia (USG) to proceed as they wish.

The debate over the health insurance plan that would be implemented throughout USG began in 2004 in response to a directive from former Chancellor Meredith. Plans initially called for a comprehensive insurance reform that would allow for mandatory coverage for all USG students.

The new committee has been named and no representatives from Tech or the University of Georgia will be a part of the committee.