2008 Woodie Awards
ISU students protest state wide student insurance
Ben Kennedy
Issue date: 11/19/05 Section: News
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If the State Board approves the proposal, ISU students could see their student health insurance rates raise to around $500. Currently ISU students pay $390 a semester for health insurance.
The proposal would provide students with $1 million for "catastrophic coverage." Catastrophic coverage protects the policyholder against major accidents and diseases, such as severe burns or cancer .
ISU's current health insurance policy has a catastrophic coverage of $50,000 per incident per year.
The new proposal would pool all of the state colleges' catastrophic coverage together.
According to Hobson, when ISU was accepting bids for student health insurance last spring, ISU was offered catastrophic coverage of $250,000. This would have set the price to $430 per student per semester. Hobson is confident that if the proposal passes, students could be paying over $500 per semester for coverage.
"We don't need it and quite frankly we can't afford it," Hobson said.
Hobson thinks that $1 million dollars of catastrophic coverage is overkill for your typical college student.
Ryan McBride, the president of the ISAO, said that he and other members plan to write the state board and express their concerns over the proposal. The ISAO is a recently formed organization at ISU that was started in part due to the continuing decline of higher education funding and raising tuition fees.
Even though there are only 20 people in the organization, McBride said they plan on approaching other clubs and organization around ISU and ask them to write the SBOE about the proposed health insurance policy.
"These are genuine concerns," McBride said. "I just want people to ask about the situation and to voice any concerns they might have."
Hobson and ASISU Vice President Will Sharp also plan on voicing their concerns during the next SBOE meeting. The meeting will be held at ISU on December 1 and 2. Hobson said that if enough students voiced their disapproval, he is confident the SBOE would not pass the proposed changes.
"It is something that we can win very easily," Hobson said.