Following a year with losses totaling more than $1 million dollars, the Student Health Insurance Plan provided to domestic students through University Health Services has introduced a new insurance plan that has been significantly scaled back.
Some changes to this years plan include a $500 cap on prescription drugs, a doubling of the maximum deductible and exclusions for preexisting conditions, for which the plan formerly provided $4,000.
Linda Hammer, program manager for SHIP, said she has already received complaints about the new plan.
'The biggest complaint has been the prescription drug cap. There are some people who will make it one month on this prescription plan,' she said. 'Students should be scared because the future of [SHIP] is very uncertain.'
Ferd Schlapper, director of administrative services at UHS, said the only alternatives to these limitations were either to increase the premium from $879 per student to $2,127, or to set up a system of automatic enrollment in SHIP unless students opted out of the SHIP plan, which would reduce the percentage of high-risk students utilizing the coverage.
'In setting up some sort of opt-out system you get a much broader and better risk pool,' he said. 'If nothing happens there will be no student insurance plan.'
While the previous program had been loosing money for several years, Hammer said last year the program did especially poor.
'Last February we started meeting with campus officials saying this looks bad and we got a luke-warm response,' she said. 'Then when the numbers came in they didn't look bad'they looked atrocious.'
Hammer said she expects problems later in the year when students cannot receive the coverage they have had previous years.
'We still are in the open enrollment period until Sept. 15, but the numbers are similar to those last year,' she said. 'People don't know what they purchase until they need the care. In two months when students access the plan, I expect more complaints but I can only imagine.'
