Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link on How Health Care Plans Fail Students

Bryan A. Liang writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of student health care and insurance plans, which are under increasing scrutiny. The Chronicle article is behind password protection, but SCUP members can read his related article from the April–June 2010 issue of Planning for Higher Education here.

Here he explains the practices under examination:

The exclusionary practices and poor quality of college health plans are unfortunately common. A 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office noted that approximately 80 percent of students carry public or private insurance, either through a parent's insurance or on their own. Yet according to College Parents of America, an advocacy group, many colleges reject the use of that outside insurance. The GAO report also found that college-based plans, besides their low ceilings on coverage, also have payment caps on common services, like outpatient care, that further reduce coverage, high out-of-pocket costs, and simply offer little for the money compared with health plans available in the community.

Moreover, other sources besides Cuomo have also found that, beyond rejecting standard insurance and offering limited benefit plans, college plans spend little on, but profit much off, students. Investigative reports by BusinessWeek have indicated that the "medical-loss ratio" for such plans—the percentage of premiums spent on services—should be close to 80 percent, using community business practice and state law as benchmarks. Health-reform legislation also uses that benchmark. Yet college plans spend far less—reportedly as low as 10 percent in some cases.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to the initial source for Auditing Campus Employee Health Care Insurance Dependents?

Several large campuses or systems are the leading edge of a wave of "audits" of the dependents claimed by employees as eligible on health insurance plans. It's saving some institutions a great deal of much-needed money, but it also ruffles some feathers, especially if the communications are not done right. We hope those institutions planning to do this soon actually consult their in-house planners regarding how to avoid needlessly worrying staff already undergoing tons of stress: More.

Guthrie acknowledges that the Georgia system is part of an "early wave" of higher education institutions going the insurance audit route, which is standard operating procedure in the corporate world; Norman Jacobson, a senior vice president at Sibson Consulting, a human resources firm, estimates that roughly 10-20 percent of colleges and universities have taken such a step.

Jacobson projects that many more will eventually do so (and suggests that they should), primarily because it makes good financial and fiduciary sense. But for the early adopters in higher education like Georgia, it's inevitable that anything that could take away a benefit at a time when employees are struggling financially will be a "high-sensitivity" issue.

Given that understandable sensitivity, "you could do everything right, have the perfect process, and still have angry people," said Jacobson. "There's always going to be someone who feels, 'I've been married to my wife for 25 years, why in the world are you asking for a marriage license?' "