An increase in health insurance premiums and a decrease in benefits will have many of Penn's graduate and professional students paying more for less at the start of the new academic year.
The Penn Student Insurance Plan -- which offers three premiums -- is raising prices on one of the three packages while simultaneously decreasing package benefits.
While all full-time Penn students are required to have insurance, those who rely on the Penn Student Insurance Plan are mostly graduate and professional students.
With insurance costs rising as part of a national trend in health care, Penn's carriers, Aetna/USHealthcare, could no longer afford to keep the rates flat. When the contract with the company expired, Penn administrators chose to raise the premiums and take packages of smaller benefits from the carriers after rounds of renegotiations with the group.
The rates for students without dependents -- which includes most of those relying on Penn's insurance plan -- will rise to $1,350, a 35 percent increase from the previous year. The rates for students with spouses or dependents will remain unchanged.
"For three years, we've been in a unique situation," said Evelyn Wiener, director of Student Health Services. "We had the best of both worlds -- rich benefits and low costs."
If Penn offered packages with the same level of benefits as in previous years, students would be facing an 80 percent increase in health insurance premiums, forcing the University to reevaluate the types of packages offered.
"Nobody is happy with this situation," Graduate Students Associations Council President Darren Glass said. "But I'm convinced that the University did as good a job as it could with the negotiations."
Not all graduate students will be affected by the change, as nine of the 12 schools pay for health insurance for doctoral students while the other three offer higher graduate student stipends. The change will ultimately affect roughly 7,000 students.
Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania -- a group currently seeking unionization of Penn's graduate employees -- met in early August to address their frustrations with the new plan and better inform students about the changes.
GSAC and Graduate and Professional Student Assembly representatives have already met with administrators to discuss how the price increase will affect a graduate student's tight budget.
"At this point, we don't have any concrete suggestions," Glass said. "But we're working on trying to figure things out."
While Penn's insurance plan has been characterized in recent years by many benefits at a constant low cost, universities of similar caliber, demographic make-up and locale have not been so lucky.
Stanford University is one of the most dramatic cases, with premiums almost double those at Penn. Students who cannot afford coverage at the California school were told to seek medical assistance from the state.
Decisions about the Penn Student Insurance Plan are made by the Student Health Insurance Advisory Committee, which deliberated for months to find the package that would most benefit students.
"Nine out of 10 students benefit financially from the choices we made," said Max King, the executive director of the Office of the Vice Provost for University Life.
Established in the mid-1990s, the advisory committee includes eight student representatives -- two undergraduate and six graduate and professional -- as well as the director of Student Health Services and several other representatives. Deputy Provost Peter Conn chairs the committee on behalf of Provost Robert Barchi.
