[Bgsa] GSHIP

[Carla Essenberg]

Hello Everyone,

The GSA council met last night to talk with Dean Childers and some
other administrators about the proposed move to the UC system-wide
health insurance plan, and to vote on that move.  The Dean made it
clear that our campus will be moving to the system-wide plan at some
point, probably in the next few years, whether we want to or not, and
also that although the UCR administration wanted our opinion on it,
the decision about whether to join this year does not rest with us.
We ended up voting unanimously to oppose changing to the system-wide
plan and have empowered the GSA's GSHIP committee to compile a list of
the things we would like to see changed before we will support making
that switch.  Below is a list of some of the main things that people
did not like about the system-wide plan and would like to see
addressed.  If there are things you would like to add to that list,
please write to me soon so that I can pass them on to the GSHIP
committee, or write directly to Eric McCoy, the chair of our GSHIP
committee, at gship.gsa at ucr.edu (I'm not sure what the timeline is
here, so it is possible I won't pass things on to him in time).

Here are the main things people didn't like about the system-wide plan:

1. The absence of any graduate students on the executive committee
that decides what the plan will be.  UCLA has been holding back from
joining the system-wide plan until certain demands are met, and one of
the things they have asked for is that there be graduate students on
this executive committee.  We would like to make the same request.

2. The deductible ($200 for students and $400 for dependents).  I
should note that this would not apply to services offered at the
Campus Health Center or to any service that has a copay listed in the
plan.  Nonetheless, if you need one of the other services, it would be
a considerable expense.  The Office of the President (which decides
what the plan will be) is apparently not willing to be flexible about
this.  The view of many of us at the meeting was that, given that UCR
stands to save about $200 per student if they switch to this plan, and
given that most students will never need the services to which the
deductible applies, our campus should be able to set up a fund to
cover or at least reduce this deductible for the relatively few
students who need it, particularly those for whom it would be a
substantial financial hardship.  Our campus already has a fund for
helping out students who are having trouble with their medical
expenses, so they would just need to expand that fund.

3. The bad reputation of the system-wide plan's provider, Anthem Blue
Cross.  Apparently there are some benchmarks built into the contract
with Anthem that they have to meet (or pay large penalties), and maybe
that is adequate protection, but we weren't told enough at the meeting
to convince us of that.

4. The potential absence of adequate mental health care services
through the system-wide plan.  There is some concern that Anthem Blue
Cross don't have enough mental health care practitioners on their
network to provide adequate services to us in Riverside (I gather that
this has been a problem at one or more other campuses).  Anthem have
made some agreements with the university that should fix that, but
again, not everyone at the meeting was fully convinced that what they
were doing would be adequate.

5. The higher co-pays for brand-name prescription drugs.  They
actually get generic drugs cheaper than we do, but prescription drugs
are more expensive.  I don't have a good sense of how many people will
be adversely affected by this.

By the way, the reason that we had the vote this week rather than at
our regular meeting next month (which was when we planned to have it)
was that the Office of the President sprung a deadline on our campus
and are putting a lot of pressure on our administration to make the
decision right away.  My impression is that there are only two
explanations for this: either the people at the Office of the
President are too incompetent to communicate this deadline to us in a
timely fashion or they are trying to pressure us into doing something
that they suspect is not in our best interest.  The effect has been
that there has not been time to get competing quotes from our current
health insurance provider.  The administrators seemed to think it
unlikely that our provider could give us as much for as little money
as UCR would get from the system-wide plan, but we currently have no
way of confirming that.

Anyway, let me know if you see other things about the system-wide plan
that you think should be addressed before we join it.  I have attached
a spreadsheet comparing it to our current plan, and there is more
information at the following site:

http://www.gsa.ucr.edu/Health.html#Links

Carla

-- 
Carla Essenberg
PhD Candidate
Department of Biology
University of California, Riverside
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