Beginning in Fall 2012, student health insurance fees will rise by $146.

At a Feb. 15 Board of Trustees meeting, Board Vice Chair Robert Boey said a “major contributor” to the fee increase is the “dramatic” 17.9 percent rise in health insurance premiums this year.

“From what we’ve been told, the main problem is that last year, apparently the student’s money that was paid out exceeded the money that was taken in by the insurance company,” Boey said. “So there are quite a lot of expenditures. Apparently this is a substantial savings with the 40 to 60 percent increases that most insurance companies are asking for.”

At the risk of being forced to cut coverage, school officials decided to continue with the exact same plan, but at a higher rate said Austin Quick, Student Association Senate speaker and student representative to the Board of Trustees.

“Instead of making the plan less all-encompassing, we decided to provide the same as before,” Quick said. “It just costs more.”

Current rates are set at $830 a year and will be rising to $976 a year.

In addition, Quick said the new plan is supposed to cover students year-round and does not cover dependents like the current plan does. Student health insurance at NIU presently offers the option of adding a dependent, such as a child, onto the plan for an extra cost.

“This is quite a good bargain, I think, for the students,” Boey said. “The student health insurance costs, I think, somewhere in the vicinity of $850 to $900 a year. They get 12-month coverage for that, so they are covered during the summer as well as during the semesters.”

However, not all students say they can attest to the current plan’s effectiveness. Kamara Coke, sophomore early childhood education major, said her experience with the plan has been less than ideal.

“First I had government insurance, but they said that’s not valid, so I was basically forced to get this,” Coke said. “I would choose government insurance over this one because it covers more.”

Coke described the student health insurance offered by NIU as “barely” meeting her basic needs.

“I don’t think it’s quite efficient, I think it’s just like the bare minimum,” Coke said. “It’s not really a good insurance plan. And over the summer, they cut it off. They asked if I wanted to extend it over the summer, but you’d have to pay that fee, so I don’t think it’s effective at all.”

James Buikema, senior political science major, said he was disappointed with what student insurance offers and the process users go through to file claims and receive benefits.

Although he was paying for the school’s insurance for a period, Buikema said it “wasn’t very good” and that he did not “get much use” out of it.

After attempting to utilize NIU’s insurance plan, Buikema and his parents decided to switch him back to the family plan.

“Now I’m on my parent’s plan,” Buikema said. “It didn’t seem like Health Services was very good, they didn’t really try to get my needs met.

Quick, however, said he believes that NIU’s plan is superior to most other state university insurance plans.

“I just really want to emphasise that for how expensive health insurance is, this is really good plan for students,” Quick said. “The increase in price reflects an increase in the number of claims filed, so obviously students are using it.”

Boey agreed in his statement that when compared to other state colleges, the price increase is worth the extended coverage.

Additionally, Boey said “students were involved in all these fee increase discussions and approved of the fee increases,” although some students disagree with the committee’s methodology of finding student representatives.

For the student health insurance fee increase, Quick and Student Association President Elliot Echols were chosen as the student liaisons and helped to approve the measure.

“I would recommend probably a council or a poll,” freshman accounting major Tim Michaels said. “If they use just the two students right off the bat, they may not know the needs of all the students.”

Quick said that all of NIU’s educational and financial committees are appointed student representatives. Those groups then meet several times over the semester to discuss upcoming needs within the committee’s budget.

The increase will take effect in August 2012.