The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia recently made reckless and irresponsible changes to graduate insurance. The maximum out-of-pocket expenditure has been quadrupled from $2,500 to $10,000. In addition, the maximum benefit for dependents has drastically decreased from $300,000 to $50,000. What do these changes mean? They mean everything to the 21 students they are likely to affect across the University System of Georgia.

Students with debilitating illnesses like breast cancer will incur an out-of-pocket expense of $10,000 each year, which means that students will likely have to take out burgeoning student loans in order to cover medical procedures. Graduate insurance was supposed to protect students from catastrophic illnesses, but the Board of Regents’ changes have taken a basic policy and turned it into a catastrophe waiting to happen.

While the Board of Regents made these changes in light of the economic malaise, they were done without student input and were not communicated to graduate students effectively. The Board of Regents has no student representatives, as do many other boards of regents across the country. Further, the Regents failed to engage graduate students regarding these changes. This failure left open the possibility for students to find out about these changes in the emergency room.

The Board of Regents could have increased premiums 12 percent in order to maintain the same level of coverage. Currently, graduate students pay roughly $430 per semester. However, even with last year’s level of coverage, the University System of Georgia lags behind peer institutions: North Carolina State, the University of Florida, the University of Kentucky, the University of Arizona, the University of Missouri and Indiana University all subsidize graduate insurance for students on assistantship at 100 percent. Further, the policies are far more comprehensive than the coverage across the University of Georgia system. This means that the University of Georgia System is losing its competitive advantage to rival institutions.

Please write your state legislators on the Higher Education Committee and communicate the dangerous consequences that will result from this policy change.

William Rooks

President, UGA Graduate Student Association