Health Care Q&A

A continuation of Health Care: Now and the Future

Q&A With Denise Link, Associate Dean for Clinical Practice and Community Partnerships

Q: What do you suggest for students who are graduating for health insurance?
A: I do highly recommend to students that they get some kind of health care coverage. There’s a lot of products on the market. Probably if they’re a relatively healthy individual…they could probably do best by going to a company and just purchasing a very simple package or a service that would just cover them in the event that they were, god forbid, involved in an automobile accident or had to be hospitalized for some reason. That’s the thing that’s going to protect them from these high medical bills. Those are the things that are pushing people into bankruptcy these days. It’s not the $45 or $50 office visits that they need because they have an earache…that kind of stuff you can pay for out of your pocket… You can’t forsee an accident. That is the original intent of insurance. It really was never intended to be this kind of a thing where you cover the everyday routine kinds of health maintenance things.

Q: Do you think ASU’s health plan is better than going to a regular doctor, quality wise?
A: It’s probably the same…the advantage of it is you know what it’s going to cost you.

Q: Since the health clinic is open to the public, do students get more of a discount than the general public?
A: We offer the same plan, whether it’s the students or whether it’s the public. [This is for the Downtown campus]

Q: How do you think the current health care situation will affect students in the future?

A: I think it’ll affect them the same way it affects everybody else. I’m hoping that they get some sort of health bill passed. It’s sort of still iffy whether it’s going to be a health care reform bill and how health care is delivered or is it going to be a health insurance reform bill. The different bills are taking a different focus. Both areas have lots of room for improvement. We need to do a better job at helping people stay healthy and making those opportunities available to them…a little less focus on only helping them when they’re sick. And that’s what we have right now. The type of health care that people need now is very different [from] the type of health care they needed, say, 30 or 40 years ago. We have many, many more people now that their health problems are more of the long-term nature.
The health care delivery piece has to be addressed and how we deliver health care to people has to be approached in a different way. And then how we help people to afford it…so that more people can afford coverage, more people share the cost of that coverage.
People need to be able to move in and out of the system..and not be blocked because the situation changed or because they changed employers. That stuff’s got to stop. And it can if everybody’s in…if you say everybody has to be insured…you have to have some exceptions…but for the most part, in general, everybody has some skin in the game.