Insurances

I was going to reply to Nate's comment about my meeting with a higher up about our postdoctoral insurance plan, but I figured I'd just post an entry to discuss some extra bits.

The meeting went ok, although I learned very little new information. As expected I was told that having the crappier health insurance, combined with a bigger paycheck, and lesser benefits was better or no worse than employee insurance.

What I learned was:

When one is getting paid through a training grant or fellowship, not taxes, social security, FICA, etc. is deducted. Also, the insurance is paid for by the overhead of the grant, so the individual has no monthly contributions to the health insurance deducted monthly. So the thinking is that, even though we don't get matched retirement (up to 5% by Vandy), disability benefits, dental, vision, or life insurance (which regular employees have deducted according to how much coverage they choose for themselves), we get extra monies every month that at the end of the year add up to about $3500 (off a $40K/year postdoc salary).

The thinking is that one can then take that extra money and invest it and that the returns would be equal or greater than a regular employee would get through their retirement. The catch on all of this is that this does not take into account if the person actually needs to use the insurance, to say get their wisdom teeth pulled, or some procedure that is not covered by the insurance. This specially stinks if itwould have been covered with the employee's insurance. This puts postdocs, especially those with kids, at a greater disadvantage by having to pay large sums of monies at once.

What really got me was the part when the higher ups were trying to argue that paying for a dental plan would not be smart because who really goes to the dentist? In other words, why pay for a monthly dental plan plus the premiums that you are not going to use, at least not all that often according to them. Another postdoc then mentioned that getting 2 dental cleanings and x-rays would offset the $120/year basic dental plan offered to employees. In my case, the $30/month plan (for Nat and myself) would have saved us about $1000, or half the cost of getting my teeth pulled:

Cost of surgery: $2000
Dental plan ($30/month): $360
Upper end premium for 4 wisdom teeth: ~$740

I do want to point out that this is not entirely Vandy's fault. The training grants and fellowships were created by Congress, and the way they were created, as training fellowships, prevents universities from deducting FICA from the pay. As such, universities cannot treat postdocs as employees. This especially hurts when the university, like Vandy, has very good benefits for its employees and makes the paltry postdoc insurance seem lame.

Lastly, one scary thing that was brought up is that our current insurance only covers up to $250K in medical expenses per person. While this number is quite large, I believe that certain medical treatments, although rare especially considering the age of most postdocs, could leave a postdoc in dire straights and with HUGE medical bills.

While I do not claim to be an insurance expert, I will say that these last few days have reinforced my belief in a nationwide insurance plan. I am even ok paying for other people to get treatment, even if they arose because of bad decision-making in their part, simply because I believe that if you spread the cost over a large number of people (a.k.a. the entire country), the cost to us individuals, financially, morally, and otherwise, would be a lot smaller.

Then again, I can always move to Canada.