Beginning with the 2016–17 academic year, all full-time Syracuse University students will be required to have health insurance.

Dean of Student Affairs Rebecca Reed Kantrowitz presented SU’s new health insurance plan to the Student Association at Monday night’s meeting in Maxwell Auditorium.

Starting next academic year, all incoming, newly enrolled full-time students, as well as current and incoming full-time international students, will be required to have health insurance, according to a student health insurance fact sheet distributed during Monday’s meeting. The following year, the health insurance requirement will apply to all full-time university students.

The cost of the new student health insurance plan, which will be provided by the university through Aetna Student Health, will be $1,890 for those without insurance and $2,742 for those with insurance who voluntarily purchase the plan, according to the fact sheet.

The decision comes after the university’s Student Health Insurance Advisory Committee confirmed that the university’s current health insurance plan was unsustainable.

According to the fact sheet, SU is one of only a few national peer institutions that currently doesn’t require student health insurance, according to the fact sheet. The university instead offers students the opportunity to purchase a voluntary plan.

Kantrowitz said in an interview that because the university had so few students on the voluntary plan, the university’s health insurance carrier basically said that they could not offer the voluntary plan anymore due to how expensive it was for them to do that.

She said Chancellor Kent Syverud reached out to the health insurance carrier last year, asking for one more year to figure out what the university wanted to do and what was going to be the best decision for students.

“That’s what we decided this year, that we really wanted to be able to offer that for students, and the only way to do that was to at least have some students required to have this health insurance plan,” she said.

Aetna Student Health will be SU’s new carrier for the student health insurance plan. Students that already have health insurance that meets the minimum standards of the Affordable Care Act and extends to cover Syracuse, won’t have to purchase the plan through the school, according to the fact sheet.

Kantrowitz said she thinks the group of students that will have the biggest transition will be international students, who are required to have a health insurance plan starting next academic year. She said that is the group SU will be giving a lot of extra attention to and will spend time with to make sure they understand what their obligation is given the new requirement.

The university will host two question-and-answer sessions in Grant Auditorium on April 14 and April 15. The sessions will run from 6–7 p.m. and 5:30–6:30 p.m., respectively.

“I think this promotes a solid investment in students’ education,” Kantrowitz said. “I think it is that simple, that you just never know when something might happen and so to be able to have the ability to have a really solid health plan available to you that the institution is offering I think is really important. I feel good about that.”

Published on March 17, 2015 at 12:50 am

Contact William: wrnorris@syr.edu