Graduate Student Health Insurance on the Way But Not For All
by Jessie Goldstein and Renee Mcgarry
Beginning in January 2009, many students at the Graduate Center will have access to health insurance through the NY State Health Insurance Program (NYSHIP). Many of us have fought hard for this basic right, and it would seem that our efforts have been rewarded. The Adjunct Project is appreciative of all the hard work that has been put into this by the administration and by the Professional Staff Congress.
While we are pleased that many students at the GC will finally have access to this basic human right, it is important for us to maintain a critical perspective on these new benefits, and to realize that the fight for health insurance at the Graduate Center is far from over.
First the good news: the NYSHIP plan will cost individual students about $10 a month, and family coverage will cost about $92 monthly. The coverage is relatively comprehensive, and even includes dental and vision coverage. For many student-workers at the Graduate Center, NYSHIP will provide rather adequate health coverage.
There are, however, a few important limitations to this new health coverage that must be noted. The plan’s drug benefit caps at $2,500 per year, which means that any students who require expensive medications for chronic illness may find the coverage to be insufficient. The plan also does not cover routine health exams, except to offer a $60 reimbursement once every two years. Lastly, this plan is, like all health insurance in the U.S., still part of an overly corporatized health system where patient-doctor interactions are minimal, and each of us is one illness away from a Kafka-esque trail of paper work, automated messages and bureaucratic procedures that may very well bring you to the brink of sanity… Fortunately mental health services are covered, up to 15 visits per year.
The Graduate Center will be joining a group health plan that is already in existence, and has been created specifically for graduate and teaching assistant employees of SUNY. These employees are represented by the Graduate Student Employees Union (GSEU) whose contract sets out the terms of their healthcare coverage. Since CUNY will be piggybacking on their plan, as of now we will have no power to negotiate the terms of our health coverage, and will be relying on the work of GSEU in their negotiations with their employer.
This however may be able to change as we move forward, and the Adjunct Project will continue to monitor the situation closely.
The most glaring problem with the coverage that we are being given is the limited pool of Graduate Center students that it will cover. Only doctoral students employed as a Graduate Assistant or as an adjunct will be eligible. This means that all MA students are ineligible, as are all students who do not work for CUNY in one of these eligible job titles.
Throughout this past year, the Adjunct Project has fought for health insurance for all members of the GC community. Both the PSC and the CUNY administration have responded to these calls by subtly modifying this demand, telling us, and the GC community, how they are committed to the same goals as us, to providing health insurance to all working graduate students; in other words, to limit this benefit to only a portion of graduate students at the GC. The PSC claims that its hands were tied — that legally it was only able to bargain on behalf of its members, and therefore could only work on a deal to provide health insurance to graduate students covered by their collective agreement.
This however, does not explain why MA students, who are just as much members of the PSC as doctoral students, have been excluded. The administration, on the other hand, has none of these limitations at all, and has never once justified its decision to work only with the PSC in developing a health care plan for graduate students, well aware of the limitations that such an approach would entail. The end result is a partial victory — health insurance for some graduate students, but not all.
The Adjunct Project continues to hold the position that all members of the Graduate Center community should have affordable access to health insurance, and as this new coverage is unrolled for many but not all of us, we will not stop pushing for this goal. Our position can be summarized by three goals.
1. To expand existing coverage by eliminating the drug benefit cap or by augmenting the NYSHIP insurance with a secondary policy that kicks in once the drug cap is reached.
2. To expand access to this coverage to all graduate students at the GC.
3. To establish a process whereby ALL graduate students and/or their representatives can have a substantive roll in the ongoing administration of health care benefits at the GC. This means that representation by the PSC will not be sufficient, as they are only able to represent GC students who are also covered by their collective agreement.
