I am writing in response to the Badger Herald’s editorial opinion rejecting an opt-out provision for SHIP. I am urging students to support a policy that will provide affordable health care to thousands of students.

SHIP coverage is a boon to students who cannot turn to their parents’ health insurance for coverage or whose health insurance provides insufficient coverage.

The facts are clear: an opt-out provision makes health insurance more accessible to students. In the current opt-in program, the cost of health insurance is excluded from students’ financial-aid packages. Students who cannot access health insurance through their parents must dig into their own pockets to pay for health insurance.

If SHIP were an opt-out program, the cost of health insurance would be included in students’ financial aid packages, giving students the funds to obtain health insurance. This would be a boon for the 20 to 25 percent of students who are not fully covered by health insurance, as medical bills are one of the top reasons students are forced to withdraw from UW. Turning SHIP into an opt-out program will allow more students to access health insurance.

Opt-out provisions are not overly burdensome. My alma mater, the University of Illinois, is a Big Ten school like UW. University of Illinois has an opt-out program for its health insurance. As an undergraduate, I was covered by my parents’ insurance. Therefore, I filled out one simple form and avoided having to pay a penny for health insurance I did not need. Had I not been so fortunate, I would have been thrilled to find affordable insurance available through the university.

The alternatives are bleak. Reducing benefits means that more students will go without medically necessary health care. Increasing advertising for SHIP as a way to reduce health-insurance costs is absurd.

The problem is that insurance providers are not willing to bid on UW students as long as SHIP is an opt-in program. All the advertising in the world will not encourage more competitive bidding by insurance companies, nor make more funds available for students who cannot afford to pay for SHIP.

An opt-out program will enable more students to access SHIP, and thus encourage more competitive bidding by insurance providers and reducing costs, without compromising benefits.

An opt-out program will control health-insurance costs without imposing an undue burden upon students. Providing health coverage to all who need it is well worth the time it takes to check a box.

Russell Ainsworth, UW law student

In my opinion it is irresponsible to imply that the 45 minority students that left school in 1998 left because the university did not provide them with an environment in which they felt that their needs were being met. Perhaps the university, in an attempt to increase “diversity” or fill abstract quotas, admitted slightly less-than-qualified students and these students had to leave school for academic reasons.

Furthermore, while I do not know the exact numbers, I am sure that hundreds of non-minority students leave this same school every year. Do they leave because their needs are not being met? Or is it academic? Of course, that is difficult to quantify, but I don’t see cutouts on Bascom Hill for the non-minority students that had to drop out.

It is irresponsible to continue to blame the university for something that is very difficult for them to control such as the drop-out rate of their students.

Tim Fuller, UW junior

There are factions in the state Assembly that would like to de-fund family-planning programs, threatening to cut millions of dollars in federal funding for women to gain basic reproductive and preventive care; tomorrow, Bill 831 will be up in Assembly.

If this bill passes, vital programs such as Planned Parenthood are in jeopardy of losing their necessary state funding. Family funding is a necessity for the well being and good health of our state, as recent statistics show Wisconsin family planning clinics serve 150,860 women each year.

Nobody can ever say there is too much funding and support for women in regard to services such as pregnancy testing, annual exams, contraceptive services and supplies, and treatment of sexually transmitted infections such as breast cancer and cervical cancer. Funding for these treatments makes sense; they save lives and make the quality of life better. Without funding, the state of Wisconsin will be regressing to a time, not so long ago, when a woman had very few choices about family planning and disease prevention.

Shall we revert back to the days of old and have our women subject to such strife and unnecessary angst? Should women not have the necessary funding to combat such diseases and receive basic reproductive health care? Anybody who has used Planned Parenthood services in the past knows how integral their services are, and that organization is just one piece of cost-effective heath care that truly has results.

I ask the men and women in the Assembly who support this legislation, how healthy will the state of Wisconsin be without the health of our daughters, sisters, mothers, co-workers and friends? It is easy to view certain programs as expendable if one does not realize this bill will affect the health of everyone, man and women, and family and friends; everyone will suffer when the funding for these health services are nonexistent.

I ask the representatives of the Assembly to have more intellegence and foresight then our bumbling president on these issues.

Matthew Fernandez-Konigsberg, UW senior