Regents proposes mandatory insurance

A plan is in the works to develop a mandatory health insurance policy that will include both undergraduate and graduate students starting in the fall of 2008.

All current and incoming students who are not already covered by an adequate plan would need to enroll in Tech's program. Those who do have coverage, typically under their parents, would be granted what is known as a hard waiver.

"We're seeing a lot of health insurance plans cutting down the age that parents can continue to carry their children on their insurance plans, even if they're enrolled as a full time college student," said Mitch Keller, graduate SGA president, who has worked with the graduate senate and administrators to develop the proposal.

"I've seen students with medical problems have to drop out of school because they could no longer pay for it," said Cindy Smith, director of Health Services.

"It's devastating, and medical costs are so high that there's no way that someone can go through a hospital stay of very long and pay for it. People just don't realize how quickly it can add up, so it's not anything that people want to think that they're going to need but when you need it, it's too late to buy it," Smith said.

Currently health insurance is already mandatory for certain students, including graduate students who receive full tuition waivers or fellowships that fully fund their tuition, undergraduate or graduate students holding F or J visas, and any student enrolled in a program requiring proof of health insurance.

The proposed program would be a consortium among Georgia's three other research universities, which are the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and the Medical College of Georgia, in which the universities would be able to negotiate a better plan than is currently available to most students by using the large pool of students as leverage.

Keller estimated that 20-30 percent of the approximately 80,000 students at Georgia's research universities would lack insurance that meets the minimum standards.

"But that's a big enough pool that it drives the premiums down and allows the benefits to go up and costs to fall, and it keeps vendors happy," Keller said.

"By having as large of a pool as possible we're going to get the lowest rates for the students and the best benefits, and the goal ultimately is to get a plan that answers as many of their needs as possible," Smith said.

As of yet the program is only in the discussion stages, but Keller said the 2007-08 deal with Pearce and Pearce, the Institute's current provider, is only for that year and that when the contract ends they are expecting to go in a different direction.

"We're asking the administration to make some of these decisions this spring so that in the summer a competitive bid process can be conducted.

"We want to be able to sign a contract with the insurance company in December so that we have January through August to communicate with students while they're picking a school and they know what they're getting into, and financial aid packages are being determined, and the bursar's office has to figure out how to do this, and health services has to figure out how they're going the changes that might come as part of it," Keller said.

There has been some precedent around the country for this sort of mandatory insurance program. The state of Massachusetts has, since 1989, required that all full-time students enrolled at private and public universities in the state must either participate in the school's insurance program or have their own plan with comparable coverage.

Since then, a growing number of schools across the country have mandated insurance coverage on their own, though the trend has been slow to spread through southeastern universities.

Emory University enacted it for all students in the fall of 2006, and Florida State recently announced that they will be phasing it by requiring it for each incoming group of freshmen and transfer students starting this fall.