University Health Insurance ?s

[Screwed U Grad]

What is the name of your state?What is the name of your state?California

Is it legal for the university I attend to require purchase of university health insurance or some other ridiculously expensive health plan? The univeristy plan is $1600 per year, how is this not extortion? What California law makes it legal for universities to do this and are there loopholes?

[cbg]

It's not that there is a law making it legal; it's that there isn't a law making it illegal.

And I hate to tell you this, but when you get out in the real world you'll find out that $1600 a year is peanuts compared to what insurance costs. I'm paying slightly more than $3000 per year for insurance that's barely more than catastrophic. $1600 per year is, in fact, absurdly cheap in comparison to some of the costs I've seen.

[Beth3]

$1,600 PER YEAR?!? No, that's hardly extortion. cbg is correct that that is very cheap.

I just renegotiated our group health benefits where I work and the annual premium for our least expensive single insurance plan is $3,673. The premium for the "good" plan is $4,731. Of course if you want to talk family coverage, those premiums start at an annual figure in excess of $13,000...

[Crazed98]

At a community college near me it is $100 but it hardly covers anything.

[cbg]

To put this into further perspective, the first insurance plans I administered were union negotiated, group plans that covered all their membership regardless of where they worked, and which were deeply discounted because they were so broadly based. The least expensive of the plans, which covered a three state region, was $975 per year. The remainder of the plans, which were either one-state or city based, ran between $1200 and $1400 per year. The year in question was 1980.