Oh boy!
Crazy, charging students who already have health insurance to pay twice for coverage! Come on Dr. Skorton get off your wallet with $6,200,000,000 in it and use it to help cover those without insurance. Another example of the super rich pushing costs to the upper middle class.
My kid was observing the protest. I am not happy with the additional charge. We pay a lot of money for our own coverage. Any medical needs my kid would need while at school would be covered by our insurance. I do not understand why we are being charged again for the same service.
Now that is an education. A little sneak peak into the real world. Don’t worry, it’s okay because you are only paying your ‘fair share’. Get used to it.
Maybe this is like for if the student has an emergency and needs to see the nurse really urgently or something like that??
We still pay for that out of our private insurance. Gannett doesn’t do it for free. Every time my kid visits Gannett we get charged and then we submit it to our insurance. It is not free, so why the addiitional 350?
I have no issue with Cornell charging for the gym membership because if you don’t use it you don’t pay for it. In this case, we are paying for it twice. There are a lot of middle class families with great health insurance through their employers (like federal government), and those families are in the donut hole, meaning not rich enough to pay full fare, but not poor enough to get FA, so why is Cornell having those families paying for something that they don’t need? $350 could be few months of food money for some of those students. I am generally fairly supportive of what Cornell does, but this one really bites the dust. I hope Cornell students continue to protest.
@oldfort oh wow , that is really weird haha
You have a 1 percenter university with 6.2 Billion in the bank with a 1 percenter president making 1M a year telling students with $20 in their bank account and a mountain of student loans that paying twice for health insurance is "paying their fair share. It’s a bad look and a hard sell Dr. Skorton.
I have a D that will enroll in the fall. It sounds like if you aren’t on the SHIP plan, it’s very complicated. They don’t submit to my insurance company? I have to have my kid pay, get a receipt, send it home to me and then I submit for payment? Is this how this works? Any advice from parents would be helpful.
I really don’t see how they can justify this fee. In order to opt out of SHIP, you have to request a waiver by completing a questionnaire about your health insurance. So Cornell has already made a determination that your health insurance is adequate by granting the waiver. I know we pay a fortune for our health insurance and I don’t appreciate having to pay another $350. Really not sure what that extra $350 is going to get me.
What does this mean for kids who have to pay all of their own costs after FA? Since FA will not cover this fee a kid working a job to pay for their food, books other expenses will now have to work on average another 40 hours to cover this fee. This is so wrong on so many levels.
There are many things about Cornell that I love, this is not one of them. With this new fee I am rather glad that my D will be a senior next year!
Yes @annwank, it is kind of a pain. We opted out this year (daughter’s freshman year) since we already pay a lot for family health insurance. We are in Nevada, however, and it isn’t easy to find in-network providers for our insurance company near Ithaca. Our daughter, who has always been healthy, got really ill in the October and needed lots of healthcare, including a hospital admit. We tried to get her on SHIP at that point, but they were very strict about the annual waiver. Most of her doctor visits were just the 10 dollar fee at Cornell, and the hospital was emergency room, so it was covered. But they do not bill your insurance for you if you see other doctors or tests done; you have to do that yourself. And if the appointments are not “in- network”, it can be quite costly. After that ordeal, and finding that most specialists in-network were 20-50 miles away (doesn’t work when you are very sick and have no car), we are going to bite the bullet and pay for SHIP next year. It was a nerve wracking experience having our 16 yr-old get quite sick across the country and on top of that worry about huge medical bills. On the plus side, her Cornell physician was very attentive and compassionate (she called me daily), and they assigned us a liaison to help her and me with what needed to be done.
But this extra fee doesn’t make sense 
I just sent President Skorton an email to protest. I hope other parents and students will do the same.
In Skorton’s email to students he said, “…but too many other students have inequitable access to care. For example, a growing number of students with private insurance report avoiding care due to financial concerns.” In order to make sure all students will seek medical care when necessary, Gannett will now charge $10/visit to all students instead of $40 or $50.
My response to that is if those students are under insured then those students should be required to up their private insurance coverage or be required to get SHIP. The school shouldn’t levy additional costs to students who are fully insured. By charging my kid $10 instead of $50 per visit only benefits my insurance company, it doesn’t do anything for me.
@renomamma, thank you so much for the information. My husband said a few months ago when our daughter was accepted ED that he thought this would be an issue since we are in the Chicago area and finding in-network providers might be a problem if ever needed. Unfortunately, I think we are going to bite the bullet as well and put her on the SHIP plan despite the exorbitant amount we pay for family health insurance. Ugh. I understand your dilemma and the stress you went through, and we don’t want the added stress for our D and ourselves (being so far away) if some serious health issue came up, God forbid.
The $350 dollar fee for fully insured kids doesn’t make sense, but when have colleges NEVER nickel and dimed parents and students? It’s maddening.
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The problem with finding in-network providers at a geographically distant college is generic. We first encountered it when our D1 was in school in the midwest, while we (and our insurance network) were based in the northeast. D1 was without a car, which would have been required to get to the few in-network providers. I agonized about whether to pay for the college health service, since we had insurance, with all three of our kids and their various colleges.
I had some trouble getting one kid or other to actually find and use our insurer’s in-network providers. Instead she just went into the college’s health services, which was right there on campus, anyway, leaving the administrative burden of having to file the paperwork with our insurer. Which in some cases may not have ever been done.
With our last kid I am just paying the health services fee, I decided I don’t need the aggravation, nor do I want him to have to travel clear to another state to get some types of health care, which would be the case for in-network at that school. And I don’t want to deal with the paperwork. My experience proves to me that, at the end of the day, I may not get it done right.
As for a “non-use” fee, I just regarded that as another sleezy way a school might use to bury money they need to collect, without having to report a higher charge for tuition. So they don’t look as pricey vs. other schools as they are. Maybe the way they justify it is that there is a certain cost to maintain the health services facility on campus, whether or not you personally decide to use it . Moreover, many people who opt out of insurance still use that facility. And health services may provide some additional, campus-wide services, eg outreach, that are not limited to specific office visits. If that charge was stripped out they would just raise tuition instead. There would be some difference in incidence, but the numbers are not huge enough for me to whine about. Alternatively they would lower some service(s) below where they would like to have it.
I don’t know why Gannett couldn’t be run like a profitable service, charge SHIP students $10/visit and charge privately insured students going rate for their visits. If families find $10/visit plus SHIP costs to be less expensive then they can opt out of their private insurance. If they don’t have enough students using the Gannett services then scale it down, why force us to pay for something we don’t use. I guess the question is when a student gets sick who is ultimately responsible, parents or the school? I would think the parents would/should care more if their students have sufficient coverage to get proper care, but it seems like Cornell is taking over the role to ensure all students have access to low cost medical care.
$350 is not a lot of money and I only need to pay it for one year, but to me it is the principal of it. I am sure no one is not going to send their kid to Cornell over $350, but still…