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October 16, 2008, 08:15 AM ET
Cutting Health Insurance
According to The Mercury News, in San Jose, Cal., more universities are ditching family health-care coverage for graduate students because of skyrocketing costs. Stanford University and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis and Irvine, for example, don’t offer family plans for grad students anymore, and, as a result, families on those campuses are increasingly turning to government programs while parents get their doctorates, the newspaper reports:
“Our only option was Healthy Families — or no insurance at all,” said Peter Ross, who enrolled his toddler, Gemma, in the state program while he completed his doctorate in education at Stanford University.
“But I find it unethical and morally reprehensible that they take advantage of the public health care system. . . . We weren’t looking for a handout; we just wanted it offered, so we could pay the extra premium. These public programs weren’t designed for people like us, at elite educational institutions.”
Stanford still offers health insurance to its students for a fee, but the university dropped its family health plans in 2006, when annual premiums were set to double, The Mercury News reports. Amy Baldwin, associate director of Stanford’s Vaden Health Center, defended the move, saying the annual premium for a spouse would have been about $10,000. In addition, she said that …
“Only about 110 families had enrolled in the discrete program, and those members tended to have ongoing and expensive health needs. If families were included in the larger student plan, overall costs to everyone would have climbed 10 to 20 percent.”
Categories: Salary-and-benefits
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