Friday, February 25, 2005
I'm sad! Everyone pay for me!
Health Fee Referendum info.
Over 24,000 students use on-campus health services each year. The average student visits the Tang Center 2.5 times a year. If this fee is not passed, the Tang Center will have to introduce co-payments (visit fees) as high as $35 per visit. Based on this information, the average student will break even or save with the pre-paid “Safeguard” fee.
Want to guess why they gave an average, rather than a median or mode? Yes, some people have to go to the Tang Center lots of times. Others never go. The people who go fifty times a year sort of skew the curve. If you instead measured how many students will break even or save with the (haha) pre-paid "Safeguard" fee, you might see something different. The rest of the data is just as bad.
Per visit co-payments may deter students from seeking necessary health services when needed. In a Fall 2004 survey of several thousand Berkeley students, 17% said that if $20 co-payments were introduced at the Tang Center, they would definitely delay seeking health care—even for an urgent problem. Almost 50% said they might delay seeking help if a $20 visit fee were required.
The survey of several thousand Berkeley students was based on voluntary response. It is not a particularly valid representation of Berkeley student opinion.
The pre-paid “Safeguard” fee protects students from the risk of expensive co-pays in the case of sudden and unexpected illness or injury.
Nothing in the fee proposal suggests this risk will be reduced. We will likely still have to co-pay.
At this point, not only am I opposed to the pointless fee-increasing aspect, I'm opposed on principle of basic honesty. If people want me to pay 50 dollars a semester for other people's problems, they should not lie to me about it.
Update: It occured to me that the math wasn't working out above. The claim is that the average student will break even or save with the pre-paid safeguard fee, since they visit 2.5 times a year and would have to pay $35 a visit without this fee. That's $87.50 a year in co-pays. The fee is $43 a semester, and $31 over the summer. That's $117.00. This, of course, even ignores the fact that $35 a visit is the high estimate, and that the passage of this fee likely will not eliminate the co-pay, so even if you ignore summer, that's still $86.00 a year in fees, which will likely still be higher than the co-pay reduction times number of visits.
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