Anyone looking for cheap dental coverage might want to switch studies.
The U BioScience Graduate Studies program has switched to Educators Mutual Insurance Association, a dental insurance provider. The program has offered its paid graduate students dental insurance for about the past five years, but now it’s costing them only $9 a month, said Barbara Saffel, administrative program coordinator with the School of Medicine.
For the students, having the department provide them with dental insurance is important because many of them would either have to pay for basic, cheap insurance or they would not have it at all.
Kari Smith, a graduate student in biology, said she probably couldn’t afford the insurance without the department offering it for $9 a month.
“They don’t pay us enough for us to pay for it on our own,” she said.
Of the 300 graduate students enrolled in the program, about 200 of them are enrolled to receive dental insurance, Saffel said. Other students pay for their own coverage.
The program decided to offer graduate students in their department dental insurance because administrators did not want their students to have problems later in life because they were not able to afford insurance, Saffel said.
The reason for the switch from their previous provider was because EMIA offered a cheaper premium, Saffel said. However, Saffel declined to disclose who the original provider was or how much it cost.
“(We wanted) to support our students,” Saffel said. “It takes six years to complete a degree. We want to make sure students have support through their time here.”
EMIA is providing the students with 100 percent coverage of the cost for preventable care, such as twice-a-year cleanings and routine check-ups, said Teri Marx, an accountant executive with EMIA. From there, if other dental work needs to be done, depending on the coverage a student only has a co-pay at the time of the appointment, Marx said.
Although the BioScience Graduate Studies program is the only department on campus for which EMIA provides insurance, it hopes to eventually expand its insurance to other programs.
“We are very excited for this new partnership,” Marx said. “We hope this will be a very long partnership.”