Higher ed.
Monday, January 26 2009
From a story on college students foregoing health insurance:
Many employer-sponsored plans have cut-offs at either age 19 or 23, leaving part-time and graduate students, many who are just scraping by financially, with fewer health coverage choices.
College students incurred an estimated $100 million to $300 million in uncompensated inpatient medical expenses in 2004 and 18 percent of full-time students were uninsured in 2003….
The story is worth a read, but it points to one of the great injustices of higher education: the way sick people are treated. Exhibit A is the lack of health insurance; yes, most schools offer a health insurance plan – but usually skimpy and insufficient for anybody with serious chronic illness. I have always kept my parents’ insurance or bought COBRA, rather than buy a school policy, even thought it is more expensive in the short run.
What’s even worse is that insurance and other health expenses usually don’t count as a cost of going to school – so technically, you’re not allowed to use your financial aid towards those expenses. (I have done so anyway, and I expect most people do so as well.) It’s also a problem when applying for grants and scholarships. Lots of scholarships have a clause that limits the money to academic expenses; paying for your health insurance and other health expenses is not one of those expenses. Even scholarships ostensibly for sick people – like this one – only cover “Tuition, Books, Lab fees, Club or school association fees, Honor society memberships”. This ends up being more or less the same as charging sick people several thousand dollars extra to attend school; believe me, it sucks.
And once they’ve paid all that money, students are basically on their own. Student support services often don’t recognize chronic illness as an issue within their mandate. Schools as a whole usually lack any means to help sick students finish their studies. Even when grants for disabled students are available, they are not given to students with chronic illness.
Having been to a few higher ed. institutions, the irony isn’t lost on me. These are places that pride themselves on diversity, opportunity, equality, tolerance – and yet they mostly ignore sick people and the challenges they face. I hope this will start to change: the ADA Amendments Act should prompt most schools to reconsider what till now has been a very exclusive definition of disability. If not, I am sure there are sick students brave enough to take these problems to court.
(via NOW! Blog)
