Students Will Be Required to Have Health Insurance
Posted on Sept. 9, 2009UNC students will have to prove they have health insurance starting in fall 2010. Their class registrations will be placed on hold until they do.
The new administrative policy, known as a “hard waiver,” will require a student to choose the University plan or an outside plan from the private market.
The hard waiver, which the UNC System Board of Governors unanimously approved in August, will become the new standard for all 16 schools in the UNC System. Until the vote, several system schools, such as UNC-Greensboro, had a hard waiver and other schools, such as Carolina, used a voluntary policy.
“When we say mandatory, I think a lot of people have gotten confused about that,” said Mary Covington, the University’s director of campus health. “It doesn’t mean they have to buy the University plan. Probably the vast majority of folks will be on their parents’ insurance policy.”
The Board of Governors wanted to provide uniformly high-quality health care coverage at a much better rate, wrote board chair Hannah Gage ’75 in an e-mail.
“With [16] campuses,” Gage wrote, “we had a wide range of quality within the system, with some campuses providing great coverage while many of the smaller … campuses had weaker policies that cost a fortune. Where you attended school determined the strength of your policy.”
According to an overview the board reviewed in May and August, the various plans now in place have maximum benefits ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. Deductibles range from zero to $350. Some campus premiums are age-rated while others are not.
Pam Silberman ’81 (JD), president of the N.C. Institute of Medicine, said one advantage of the uniformity of the hard-waiver model is that it reduces costs for students all across the system.
“If you require everybody to get it and have one policy for the entire UNC System, you get a better policy at a lower cost than you can when you have one university going out and buying its own policy,” said Silberman, who also received a doctorate from UNC in 1997.
Shirley Ort, associate provost and director of scholarships and student aid, said that before the requirement, a Chapel Hill student would pay about $1,400 a year for the University plan.
“Now with the requirement, it will cost around $600 to $700 per person,” Ort said. “So it will cut it in half.”
Bruce Mallette, senior associate vice president of academic and student affairs for UNC General Administration, said three groups of students will feel the impact when the hard waiver becomes policy. The first group is those benefiting from the Carolina Covenant, the University’s financial aid program for students from low-income families to enable them to graduate debt-free.
Those students will now have the cost of a University plan, if they cannot afford an outside plan, factored into their financial aid package, Ort said. This year, the Covenant Scholars accounted for 11 percent of the incoming freshman class.
“We would recognize that charge as a cost of going to Carolina,” she said.
But not just low-income families are struggling to afford health insurance. Mallette said that due to the economic downturn, more middle-income students’ families can no longer afford to include them on a plan.
Finally, Mallette said, there are students who are simply uninsured.
Silberman pointed to Institute of Medicine data, which she presented to the Board of Governors, that suggest 16 percent of the state’s college students, ages 18 to 23, are uninsured. Covington said that, based on voluntary health surveys alone, 10 percent of UNC students are uninsured.
Silberman said that uninsured students are less likely to seek treatment.
“They are more likely to report they don’t have a usual source of care, they did not go to the doctor because of costs and they had their last routine checkup more than five years ago,” she said.
Mallette said the Board of Governors believes that the hard waiver will help educate those uninsured students about health care. “We believe that investment will start building [their] exposure to medical care, preventive care and primary care, and they can keep the costs down that much more,” he said.
Covington said the process of moving toward the waiver model is under way. Administrators are preparing a request for bids to provide the University insurance plan.
“Then the vendors will bid on it. There will be a discussion, and a vendor will be selected,” Covington said. “That will be [the] vendor for the UNC System.”
The vendor will then manage student enrollment. The student will visit the vendor’s Web site and submit his or her insurance information. The student’s class registration will be placed on hold until he or she can prove some form of insurance.
Silberman said the hard-waiver system is likely to grow in popularity.
“As states are trying to figure out helping the uninsured,” she said, “I think you’ll see more interest in policies like these.”
— Chris Saunders
