UPDATED: March 22, 2018 at 4:23 p.m.

Syracuse University plans to make significant progress on possible changes to graduate student health coverage by the end of the spring semester, a high-ranking university administrator said Wednesday.

During a press briefing, Graduate School Dean Peter Vanable said SU also plans to release more information about a potential change to a new graduate student health care plan at the beginning of April.

There is no publicly released information on how much money graduate students would save on a new insurance plan since SU is currently in the “request for proposal,” or RFP, phase. In the RFP phase, the university calls on health insurance providers to propose rates for health care, GSO President Jack Wilson said.

SU is considering bids from multiple insurance providers, and expects proposals on Friday, Wilson said. Graduate student health care has proven to be a contentious topic at SU in recent years.

Wilson, though, said any new plan selected by SU will be “way less expensive” and the university has guaranteed that any savings will go to graduate assistants and graduate fellows in the form of subsidized health insurance plans.

“If we can have a plan that is less expensive while still being better, that’s going to mean more money in everybody’s pocketbooks,” Wilson said.

Gerald Kominski, director of the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Health Policy Research, said the cost of healthcare is often closely related to age, so the university would be able to save money if graduate students were placed in a pool with other young, low-cost students.

Graduate assistants currently on SU’s employee health insurance plan have heavily subsidized plans because they are placed in an insurance pool with faculty, who are typically older and more likely to have various ailments, Wilson added.  

Graduate assistants would be pooled with younger graduate students on the new plan, lowering the price of the plan due to the relatively healthier pool of young people, Wilson said.

The plan is platinum level, which means that 90 percent of health care costs are covered by the plan, Wilson said. Vanable on Wednesday confirmed that figure. Faculty and staff on the employee plan are on a gold level plan, which means about 80 percent of health care costs are covered by the insurer. Platinum plans typically have the highest monthly premiums, but have the most coverage for medical care, according to Healthcare.gov.

In a letter to the editor to The Daily Orange, members of Syracuse Graduate Employees United said the possible switch from the employee to the student plan ignores the needs of students with disabilities and/or chronic conditions who may need recurring treatment or serious operations.

“It’s a slap in the face to graduate workers, both disabled and able-bodied, who chose SU because of the protections offered by an employee health care plan,” the letter said.

With platinum plans, though, students should expect more coverage on the student plan opposed to the employee plan, Wilson said, and students with disabilities or chronic illnesses should expect their medical expenses to be covered by insurance.

“If it’s not, we’ve done something wrong,” Wilson said.

The university is still deliberating whether graduate student employees can remain on the employee plan, and graduate students on the student plan will still be able to have their families covered, Vanable said Wednesday.

SGEU recently started a unionization drive in part because of what they called the high costs of SU’s plans and a lack of transparency from the university regarding student employee health care in 2015. Brian Hennigan, an organizer of the union drive, told The Daily Orange in January that nearly one-third of his pay for this semester will go to his employee insurance plan.

Vanable said he believes members of SGEU recently attended a set of listening sessions about the possible changes to graduate student health insurance. But he said they have not met with him personally to discuss the ongoing review.

Other universities in the United States have had union drives pop-up over issues regarding health care for graduate student employees.

Students at George Washington University, an SU peer institution, started a union drive because of the high upfront cost of health insurance through the university, said Scott Ross, a graduate student at GW. The university recently refused to recognize students seeking unionization because it considered the students’ work as teaching and graduate assistants to be in an educational capacity, not employment, he said.

A unionization push at Pennsylvania State University, another SU peer institution, started over health insurance. Penn State’s administration last year switched graduate student employees’ health care provider from Aetna to United Healthcare without student input, said Katie Warczak, a graduate assistant at Penn State and media officer for the college’s graduate student employee union drive.

Graduate student employees were notified of the change in April of last year, but they weren’t informed of the transition when it happened in August 2017, Warczak said. She said there was no communication from the university in the interim months, and the university said students would be without proof of insurance from August until about October.

“We still had coverage, but we didn’t have the ability to prove it,” Warczak said.

After this story was published, a Penn State spokesperson said in an email that Warczak’s claim was “factually incorrect.”

“The leadership of Penn State’s association of graduate students – the Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA) – maintains permanent representation on both the university’s Student Insurance Advisory Board (SIAB) and the Student Insurance Administrative Council (SIAC),” she wrote. “The graduate student representatives on these bodies were fully consulted about the new student insurance plan and the new vendor.”

Warczak said the lack of proof could have caused people to have to pay out of pocket and then endure a long and complicated process of getting reimbursed by an insurance company. Students often cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a procedure when they have a stipend as income, she added.

Graduate students at SU make about $18,000 per year on average, so a $1,500 health care plan is a large part of a student employee’s paycheck, Wilson said.

“Health care is one of those third rails of the American political system,” Wilson said. “Any time you touch health care, you are touching something that can mean the difference between going to the doctor and taking care of your condition, or going to a doctor, taking care of your condition and then being bankrupt.”

The university anticipates having a student health insurance plan that will be more affordable than the current student or employee plans and have more coverage than the employee plan, Wilson said. GSO members seemed to be “cautiously optimistic” about the plan, he added.

GSO considered graduate employee unionization in 2015 after SU administrators required all students to have Affordable Care Act-compliant health insurance plans by fall 2016. GSO members cited a lack of transparency from the administration as a cause, but never formally pursued unionization.

“This isn’t 2015. Unlike then, the GSO has been at the table. We’ve had these discussions, we talked about it, we’ve worked through the details, we discussed all the potential issues that may come up,” Wilson said. “And the university and us have come to an arrangement that I feel is actually going to wind up working out for us pretty well.”

CLARIFICATION: In a previous version of this post, the level of graduate student involvement in the decision to switch health care providers at Penn State was unclear.

Published on March 21, 2018 at 9:01 pm

Contact Kennedy: krose100@syr.edu | @KennedyRose001