Graduate students call for dental coverage
A student government body at the University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences is set to launch a dental reimbursement fund in an attempt to secure dental coverage from the University.
The Graduate & Professional Student Senate plans to announce Thursday the creation of a fund that will allow students to apply for reimbursements up to $500 for dental procedures. Although the fund — only $4500 taken from the GPSS’s budget — is small, organizers said they hope the program raises awareness of what students described as poor dental coverage for graduate and professional students....
As a graduate student who has had to pay for a couple of expensive dental procedures out of pocket, I would welcome any effort to improve the dental insurance situation.
That said, I'm fairly skeptical of this plan. Has the dental reimbursement fund sought out the oversight of a medical or dental professional? Can non-professionals be qualified to make dental reimbursement decisions without this sort of oversight?
I am also unsure of how comfortable I am with a (relatively) expensive funding body having "lobbying" as one of its explicit functions.
To the first poster: Why do you think graduate students do not deserve dental benefits? I suppose you skipped over the end of the article where it states that out of top tier schools, only Yale and Dartmouth are lacking in providing comprehensive dental insurance. Why don't you ponder why all the other top schools value it enough to provide it to their graduate students?
Everyone needs dental insurance, just like everyone needs health insurance. Time for single payer national health care! Well done GPSS for bringing attention to the issue.
I've spent over $5,000 on dental care over the long time I've spent at Yale - $5,000 I didn't have (I had to do a lot of out-of-school work to cover that). Much of that would have been preventable. Yale should be embarrassed (and I'll be withholding donations upon graduation until dental insurance is provided to all students).
i really don't understand why we don't have dental insurance as part of our health insurance. dental health is part of basic human health, yet we have to pay it out of pocket, making it pretty much unreasonably unaffordable. i know it's not the normal thing for employers to do nowadays, but it's really a basic human right...
Other schools provide dental, how come Yale doesn't?
I think the absence of an affordable dental plan is simply outrageous. Oral health is as much a part of overall health as anything else. Shame on Yale bureaucrats for denying the students an affordable dental plan. I am quite sure each of them has one!
And to the first poster- get a life!
It is also outrageous that dental is not included in the Yale Health Plan for undergraduate students. We can get the morning after pill, but not our cavities filled.
Why do graduate students think they deserve dental benefits? They are there to learn (even to learn how to teach if they are teaching.) Yale is not mommy and daddy, Yale is a university whose mission does not include giving dental insurance to its students... who are already quite coddled as far as I can tell.