I’m not an SU student, but I’m married to one. My wife is a first-year graduate assistant; my infant daughter and I are dependents on her health insurance. As the result of an April 4 vote by the Graduate Student Organization Senate, our insurance will be switched from the current SU employee plan to a student plan provided by Aetna. In the week following the vote, GSO Executive Board President Jack Wilson told The Daily Orange he had only received one letter that was critical of the change. I am the author of that letter.

Mr. Wilson has yet to respond to me, but since he seems to think that policy outcomes should be measured by the volume of mail he gets, allow me to offer an alternative perspective. My family is in the process of treating several chronic health issues — some of which may require surgery — and our young daughter was born with a disability. My wife and I decided to take the risk of relocating our family to Syracuse, precisely because of the strength of the employee health plan. Now, seven months later, we learn that 24 students have decided to replace the plan we chose with one they have picked for us.

How will this affect my family? We still don’t know. Aside from a handful of cherry-picked bullet points, little information about the plan has been made available. But serious concerns, including ones my wife shared with members of the GSO as well as Mr. Wilson prior to the vote, have consistently been ignored. At the April 4 meeting, the proposed change was presented as a binary choice between high and low premiums that needed to be made immediately, even though many senators seemed unsure of what exactly they were voting on.

Several members of the GSO have nonetheless described this plan as serving the “greatest good,” but who are they to make that claim? Rather than serve the student body, this process has turned the health of the SU graduate student population and their families into a zero-sum game, with winners and losers selected by a small group of students suddenly empowered to make healthcare choices for their peers.

This is an outrage. Instead of standing up for every graduate student, members of the GSO and Mr. Wilson remain dismissive of the needs of people they claim to represent. My family deserves better.

Sincerely,

Christian McKinney