Lets see if I can break this meeting I had today down in a comprehensible way:
Said meeting was about student insurance, which everyone (grad students, administration, etc) except the insurance company we buy from agrees is too expensive with too little actual coverage. Then Mr. Insurance Man representative gets up to speak…
First: He belittles Universal Healthcare and discusses how everyone in America is going to be required to have insurance by 2014, which he didn’t agree with. He openly disliked Obama’s plan of moving toward Universal Healthcare for everyone in America and stated that “making insurance mandatory for everyone” was going to cause costs of insurance to go up.
Second: He starts describing a recent decision in North Carolina where a mandatory insurance requirement was made of all students going to any North Carolina state funded higher-level institution (aka: if you couldn’t prove you had insurance, you were required to obtain it through the school). It was highly successful, lowered individual insurance premiums from $1,200 per year to $600 per year and none of the institutions saw a reduction in enrollment of students due to the requirement.
Third: He encourages the South Carolina schools to adopt a similar model so that we can start having universal coverage across the state for both undergraduate and graduate students that is not only lower in cost to the students, but also increases our overall benefits.
So, Mr. Insurance Man was against Universal Healthcare coverage and directly opposed it due to cost, but then promoted it via the North Carolina model and then encouraged us to adopt a similar model because it lowered costs. ::sigh:: sometimes I think people are against big ideas just be stubborn.
