On-Campus Health Insurance | Students go to war against the AMF

Desjardins will “reluctantly” stop offering health and dental insurance to the 300,000 students who attend CEGEPs and universities in Quebec. The Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) now requires that membership in this group plan no longer be automatic through school bills, which the cooperative considers impossible to satisfy. For their part, the student associations fulminate and promise to fight on all fronts against this “interference” in their affairs.

Some students may not know this, but they pay a certain amount each semester to have access to an insurance plan that covers health, dental and vision care, as well as travel, in some cases.

Those who do not need it can submit a withdrawal request on the Alliance for Student Health in Quebec (ASEQ) website. ¹. The window for doing so is quite short, approximately one month, and people covered by insurance in the fall semester cannot withdraw from it in the winter semester.

The system has been operating this way for a quarter of a century.

Over the years, default membership has drawn complaints and criticism, especially from students already covered by their parents’ insurance. It is true that at first glance, the idea of ​​insuring people without asking their opinion is debatable. In addition, one may have the impression – despite the 85,000 withdrawals – that the system intentionally complicates the lives of students who do not want to be insured by forcing them to go to the ASEQ site, within a fairly reduced.

For the AMF, it’s crystal clear: all this is not “fair”. And “the time had come to enforce the Insurers Act » after “years of discussions” and search for compromises which did not lead to anything acceptable, according to her.

Requirements that cannot be met

It is in this context that Desjardins – which holds about 95% of the student group insurance market in Quebec – recently received a letter from the AMF, I learned. The watchdog of the financial markets summoned the cooperative to modify the method of collecting the premium so that membership is “voluntary” and that the student agrees to pay the premium “in an informed manner”.

In the absence of changes, an “administrative penalty” of $10,000 per day could be imposed on him, warned the AMF.

Faced with these “impossible to meet” requirements, Desjardins decided not to renew the contracts concluded with 57 student associations. However, these contracts will remain in force until August.

“By moving from an automatic group membership plan with the right to withdraw to an individual membership plan, the costs for students will be constantly increasing,” explained Desjardins spokesperson Jean-Benoît Turcotti. In other words, the plan would no longer be profitable unless the price for students jumped significantly.

This is the very principle of collective insurance: the risks are spread over a large group. So everyone gets a great rate thanks to those who never make a complaint. As soon as the insurance becomes individual and optional, only those who plan to buy new glasses and have their cavities repaired subscribe to it, which makes the cost of premiums skyrocket.

At ASEQ, there is little hope of finding an insurer to take over. “If Desjardins, who has strong backs, judges that it is not viable, there is not another player who will want to offer it,” said his spokesman Marc-André Ross.

Admittedly, it is not ideal that students pay for insurance that is sometimes useless, sometimes without knowing it. But the best is the enemy of the good, the saying goes. Has this automatic membership harmed a large number of people, and to what extent? By protecting this group, do we risk penalizing an even larger pool of students who rely on this low-cost insurance?

The AMF would not tell me how many complaints it had received on this subject over the years, judging that this information was of little relevance. According to ASEQ, it’s about “10 to 15 per year”, while there are 300,000 students in Quebec. Faced with such a ratio, the decision to change a system that has been in operation for 25 years seems to him “incomprehensible”.

Student dissatisfaction

The student associations are amazed and worried. They wrote to the president of the AMF, Louis Morisset. “Your new attack on our rights demonstrates a relentlessness that we have difficulty explaining to ourselves,” they say.

“Stop interfering in our internal processes. Our associations have rights and we intend to defend them. […] We are going to meet members of the government, the National Assembly, the civil service, civil society and any other actor that we deem relevant. The AMF must back down on these directives or the government must legislate to put an end to this interference. »

At the Confederation of Student Associations of Laval University (CADEUL), we find it “completely unacceptable” that thousands of students could find themselves without insurance next September. “It’s used a lot. It meets their needs. Psychologists, antidepressants and contraception are the most requested. The insurance is currently used at 110%. We reimburse more than what is contributed by our members,” says President Cyndelle Gagnon.

For the 57 associations, the moment is particularly badly chosen by the AMF to crack down since the pandemic has exacerbated mental health problems. They specify that the claims amounted to $5 million in 2020-2021. “What would happen if this net were to disappear because of your overzealousness? »

Ten years after the maple spring, the students seem determined to undertake a new struggle.

1 – ASEQ is “the primary provider of student health and dental plans in Canada,” according to its website. Founded in 1996, this for-profit company provides one million students across the country with a range of services, including a mental health helpline, a legal protection program and a telemedicine service.