LETTER: Mandate is unsubsantiated

To the editor,

Graduate Student Senate president Maure Smith, sponsor of a proposed student health insurance mandate, rationalized the mandate on two points: 1) Students without health care put a burden on the university, other students, and the community, and 2) If students were required to have health insurance before coming to USU, it would lower insurance premiums and keep students in class.

Point 1: Vague, unsubstantiated, and not quantified. Vague in that the nature of the ‘burden’ to the purported stakeholders (students, university, and community) is not stated. As a current graduate student, an undergraduate alum, and member of the community, I offer a valid rebuttal: I am not burdened by students without health care.

Do I, myself, have health insurance, you ask? Why yes, I do. Her contention is unsubstantiated in that she provided no support for a causal relationship between some latent variable called ‘burden’ and the lack of health care by some students. The contention is not quantified in that she offered no measure of ‘burden’. What is it? How was it measured? How do you know how much ‘burden’ the community has? How do you know how much ‘burden’ is accounted for by lack of health insurance in a group of students? Why is it important to quantify this ‘burden’, you ask? It is important because the cost of health insurance IS quantifiable.

Student health insurance runs $1,500 to $2,600. Further, the out-of-pocket costs are also quantifiable – high deductibles, many exclusions, and astronomical out-of-network co-pays. Point 2: An economist you are not, Ms. Smith. Nor are you a realist. Direct me, please, to a model demonstrating how a student health insurance mandate will lower my health insurance premiums. The amount of the purported reduction? Enough to notice each month? If not – and keep in mind that I am a graduate student not exactly making bank – then I would just as soon subsidize health care for students without the means than have them struggle to put more money into the pockets of underwriters and HMOs. Further, it would be a travesty if fewer students enrolled in higher education because yet another barrier (quantifiable, substantiated) was put up by yet another short-sighted, narrow-minded, and uninformed bureaucracy.

Jim Davis, Health and Wellness Center director, and mandate supporter, commented to students, “Yet you have the resources to buy pizza and books.” Uh, yeah. Pizzas run about eight bucks. Health insurance runs $2,200.