Dear Christian,

I read your letter with a deep worry for your family’s situation and spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how to address your concerns.

Truthfully, I didn’t respond because I didn’t know what to say. I can’t offer specifics useful to you and anything less than specifics feels like an empty platitude. Neither response is sufficient.

I cannot offer specifics because I don’t and cannot know your family’s healthcare situation. As you know, healthcare is a complex thing. Disability treatment could involve regular visits to a doctor, medication, hospitalization, specialized equipment and so on. I could say how these things are covered, but no one can say how that affects your specific circumstance. What’s covered by a copay now might be less expensive under a coinsurance structure. Or perhaps not. The U.S. healthcare system is designed to make it impossible for us to know.

All we have to work with is knowledge about what’s best for the whole and what would measurably bring an improvement to the lives of graduate assistants and fellows.

So what do we know? SUBlue costs $1,494 this academic year. For graduate assistants and fellows, that is reduced to $500. A graduate family on SUBlue will pay at least $650 less next year. Under SUBlue, graduates pay about 20 percent of healthcare costs. Under Aetna, graduates pay about 10 percent, half as much. These are ACA-regulated measures of plan quality; I trust them. In sum, graduates on SUBlue now should wind up paying less in health insurance and less for healthcare next year. This means over $1 million more in the pockets of those graduates impacted by the switch.

But make no mistake: We are deeply concerned with the individual impact. No one — not me, not your executive board, not your senators — wants any graduates or families to be in a worse spot as a result of this.

New York state should publish final plan details in June, but tentative details will be released earlier than that. Once released, take a look at your situation, run the numbers and if you are worse off, please come to us. We will help any graduate work with the university to ensure they and their family can afford to stay here.

Because, ultimately, the GSO agreed to this change because it will make the lives of graduates better. We strive for nothing less.

Sincerely,

Jack Wilson, President, Graduate Student Organization

Published on April 17, 2018 at 7:28 pm