If I were France Cordova I would give graduate students more options when it came to health insurance. The current option available to graduate students is perfectly fine if all of your medical needs can be met at PUSH. However there are many medical needs that PUSH cannot meet, making the one health insurance option for Purdue graduate students far from ideal for many who are forced to use it. One of the biggest needs that PUSH doesn't meet is Maternity and Pediatric care. If as a Purdue graduate student, you or your spouse is pregnant, you are forced to use the local woman's clinic for your prenatal care and pay for most of the expenses out of your own pocket. Once you have children, the child's basic medical care can not be taken care of at PUSH, again requiring you to pay out of pocket for a lot of your children's medical care. With the current stipends that graduate students are paid, all of this out-of-pocket cost is not feasible.
This is not only a problem for the graduate student with a family, but also for any graduate student with medical needs that are more complex than something that can be fixed with an antibiotic. If a doctor at PUSH refers you to a chiropractor, dermatologist, or anything else outside of the doors of PUSH, you will likely be parting with a significant percentage of your graduate student stipend as well as spending a lot of your time trying to get the insurance company to pay for the part that they are responsible for covering.
Graduate students are not all single relatively healthy people that sometimes need an antibiotic. If they do not fit into this mold, they should be given the option of purchasing more health insurance through the university to meet their needs. Otherwise the lack of health insurance is going to keep some people (especially women) from choosing Purdue for graduate school. Given the current lack of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM fields), it seems that we should be doing everything we can to make grad school a reality for women. Purdue has highly ranked graduate programs in many of the STEM fields. It would be a disservice to the university if those rankings suffered because qualified individuals chose to get their degrees somewhere else because of a lack of health care options.
Melissa,
Nice Essay! I would like to state that, as a professor, I would be happy to pay the higher premium of a comprehensive health insurance for all my RAs. The extra cost would be easily be offset by the time and energy saved every time health care is needed, along with the added peace of mind. A high quality health insurance would be a tremendous recruiting tool for graduate students, especially women. So I am for it! -pm
I am thinking that I can't see a good reason why grad students should not have insurance similar to professors and postdocs. They work similar hours, in similar jobs, and are expected to grow into similar people, eventually. Generally speaking, grad students are likely to be pretty healthy, far more so than the average professor who is, on average, 20 to 25 years older. So it would seem that the comparatively few grad students that need serious health care, be that through pregnancy, accident, misfortune, or genetics, could be soaked up by the much higher bill the university pays for old professors.
Especially the child issue Melissa mentions is unsatisfactory. Graduate studies is a lengthy enterprise and it is pretty documented at this point that it's better to be under 30 when becoming a mother. It appears that at present the graduate students are forced into either of financial disaster, or having children later than is recommended.
Also, I think it is perilous to make students (or anyone else) that face higher risks buy more expensive coverage. This is contrary to the idea of insurance: to seek safety in numbers. If everyone just bought as much insurance as they will need, the result is, by definition, the same as without any insurance.
uli.
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