Life or death should not depend on one’s ability to pay.
The UC Student Health Insurance Plan Advisory Board understands this. In the face of mounting public pressure from students across the university as well as public officials like UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the board recently endorsed eliminating SHIP’s $400,000 lifetime coverage cap and $10,000 annual prescription drug cap.
If the recommendation is enacted, SHIP will finally align itself more closely with the federal Affordable Care Act. Because SHIP is a self-funded health plan, it is not bound by the same restrictions as other kinds of plans under the act. But as a matter of principle, UC students should expect to be protected by the act in the same way as other Americans.
This country recently underwent a lengthy debate about health care reform, and one of the prevailing ideas was that caps on coverage should be abolished. Students have made it very clear that they want the university’s health care plan to abide by the same standards, and administrators must respect that.
Yet SHIP cannot ignore its astounding projected $57 million deficit. As the university continues to discern the best course of action for addressing the health plan’s strained finances, it cannot afford to take any action that would further compound the problem. Therefore, the push to remove coverage caps should be pursued with the condition that the deficit is also being fixed and will not worsen in the process.
That does not mean the goals of complying with federal standards and solving the SHIP deficit are mutually exclusive or that one is necessarily more important with the other. Rather, the two are interconnected and need to be pursued in tandem. It is impossible to consider removing caps without thinking of the fiscal impact such a decision would have, and officials cannot consider plans to combat the deficit without taking into account the possibility of the eliminated caps.