Students' health insurance "not good enough" to provide for expensive medical treatments
08 04 08 - 11:51
Published: Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Last Modified: Tuesday, April 8, 2008, 2:04:12am
When Ziqi Liu was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, the most common type of bone cancer, in January, he immediately focused on beating the disease.
"I'm literally not worried about the bill until after the treatment. Right now I'm just focusing on getting well," said Liu, a 27-year-old who is pursuing his doctorate in molecular cellular biology at Ohio University.
But his treatment in Columbus carries a steep price. The lowest estimate for the cost of his care, which includes two rounds of chemotherapy treatments and surgery, is $300,000. Even one week in a hospital can cost thousands of dollars, Liu said.
Like all international students who attend OU, Liu had to purchase the university's health insurance plan, which only covers up to $50,000 per medical condition each year.
"There are many people who think that they have good insurance, but when they have a catastrophic diagnosis, it doesn't help enough," said Peter Osborne, media representative for the American Cancer Society. "So this idea of getting medical costs in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars is very realistic and it can bankrupt people pretty easily."
There is no exact cost of cancer care because each case depends on the type of treatment, how often it is required and other case-specific details, Osborne said.
About 1.7 million U.S. college students are uninsured, with only 57 percent of colleges nationwide offering health insurance plans to students and even fewer - 30 percent - requiring full-time students to have health insurance, according to a report released last month from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
At $918 per year, OU has the lowest insurance premium, or payments, among similar schools in Ohio for an individual student to buy into its health insurance program.
The OU health insurance plan offers the same coverage for undergraduate, graduate and international students. During Winter Quarter, about 3,600 people, 18 percent of students, purchased that plan and half of them were graduate students. In fall 2007, 1,221 of the 3,269 graduate students at OU were international students.
Each spring, Graduate Student Senate meets with OU health administrators to discuss possible improvements and renegotiate the health care policy.
The health plan coverage has improved, said Jacqueline Legg, business manager of student health services.
Three years ago, OU's plan covered up to $50,000 per accident and sickness during the students' entire tenure at the university. Now, students can receive $50,000 a year per accident and sickness, and administrators are investigating how much premiums would increase if the amount were raised to $100,000, Legg said.
"With our health care plan in general, I'm happy how receptive administrators have been and it's a top priority of GSS to keep making OU health care more affordable to students," said Dominic Barbato, Graduate Student Senate president.
Each year, though, cases like Liu's emerge where costs come all at once, and international students usually can't afford to buy another insurance plan in addition to the university plan they are required to, Barbato said.
"In (Liu's) particular case, we're working with him to make sure he's going to participating network providers that will accept the payment from the OU insurance plan. We help students investigate all options available to them," Legg said.
Some of those options include petitioning pharmaceutical companies to get medication at reduced or no cost, petitioning hospitals that were built with federal funds for financial aid and identifying other aid programs available through organizations like the American Cancer Society, Legg said.
GSS plans to raise money this spring for the American Cancer Society through Relay for Life - challenging Student Senate to a competition to raise more money - while the Chinese Student and Scholars Association has been collecting donations and cards for Liu since February.
"I can't think of a good way out of (a similar situation), and I can't really think of any other solution other than generosity," Barbato said.
With the OU plan, insurance pays the first $5,000 of medical bills up front. After this initial payment, the insurance company pays 80 percent of the costs and the students pays 20 percent until the student reaches an out-of-pocket maximum of $5,000. Once a student reaches that $5,000 limit, the insurance goes back to covering one hundred percent of bills up to $50,000.
In about 90 percent of cases, students don't have a medical diagnosis that requires them to pay more than $5,000, Legg said.
Insurance companies offer partial coverage plans because if a plan offered coverage for everything, consumers could not afford it, said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plan, a national trade association that represents about 1,300 health care companies.
It's important for consumers to have a choice to decide what they want in a particular policy and to choose what best covers their individual needs, Zirkelbach said.
The difference between student health care and employer and individual health care is that coverage is spread out over a healthier group of people, so costs are less expensive. Treatments for illnesses that usually affect an older population, like a chronic disease, are usually not covered, said Debora Spano, media representative for United Healthcare, the company that partners with the university to provide the OU health care plan.
For Liu, OU health insurance is "not good enough."
"I'm going to apply for financial aid from the hospital, but right now I have no idea of the final cost. The insurance is good for colds and prescriptions, but if you need surgery, it's not enough at all," he said.
Still, Liu's primary mission is to beat cancer.
"I don't have that much stress because I don't have a choice. I need to get well first. After I'm cured, we'll talk more," he said.