Editorial: Cover all the costs

The Student Health Advisory Board is pushing for a progressive but controversial addition to Portland State’s extended insurance plan: covering the costs of sexual reassignment surgery.

Adding this surgery to the extended plan will help lift financial burdens for those students who elect to have the surgery, and its benefits will likely be used by a small number of Portland State students. Even so, this surgery, along with other healthcare benefits, should be added to the extended insurance plan.

But the advisory board faltered when it placed this surgery so high on the priority list, causing it to leave benefits that should have been added to the basic and extended plans out of the discussion. Because the board focused so intently on this goal, there were few other necessary additions made to the insurance plan.

What else should they have added? Preventative care, most obviously. Preventative care coverage not only ensures our health, but will also save us, and the insurance companies, money in the long run.

The health center should be dispensing a larger number of prescription drugs, and must overhaul the manner in which students pay for them. Neither the extended nor the basic plan covers the cost of prescriptions such as birth control, likely one of the most prevalent medications at any college campus. Even basic services, such as eye exams, aren’t covered under either insurance plan.

For prescriptions that are covered, students must pay for the drugs upfront and then make a claim to be reimbursed, an obvious stress on any bankbook.

The Center for Student Health and Counseling does offer mental counseling services, but currently the counseling sessions cost students additional money. The same goes for alcohol- and substance-abuse counseling. It also costs money to get a mammogram.

The board said its proposal calls for better coverage for counseling services and mammograms in the basic plan, but students need more than better coverage. The basic plan should give complete counseling coverage because of the simple fact that substance abuse and depression are rampant among college students. Suicide is a leading cause of death among college students, a problem that could be curbed with additional access to counseling.

These are only a few of the problems with the insurance plans. There are many other areas that are not covered which impact thousands of Portland State students.

The board has not disclosed every change to the healthcare plan. Maybe its proposal will fix some of these shortcomings. Right now, however, it seems as if the board’s goal of securing coverage for sexual reassignment surgery eclipsed the necessity of gaining better or full coverage in other areas.

Obtaining coverage of reassignment surgery in the extended plan is beneficial for the student body. It is altruistic and it will set this already progressive university apart as a place that is inclusive and understanding. But the board has spent too much time resolving a problem that impacts a small portion of the student body, while leaving unresolved problems with PSU’s healthcare plan that impact larger factions of PSU students.

The advisory board must reevaluate its proposal so that it calls not only for coverage of sexual reassignment surgery, but also fills the many other holes in the current insurance plan.