Today's Health Insurance Benefits Issue

As most members are by now aware, we learned on the morning of 2/11/22 that PacificSource was erroneously reporting that all GRU members had no health insurance, resulting in the denial of coverage to anyone who tried to see a doctor today.  Please see below for an update on the status of that situation.

It has been a busy day for us at GRU. We have over 80 grievances currently in progress regarding the health insurance issue that was brought to our attention this morning. We received the following message from HR this evening:

“We have been notified that PacificSource has corrected their error. Upon notification our Benefits team confirmed GRU students are reflecting as having active coverage with no lapse.”

That having been said, we spoke to several of you today who interacted directly with PacificSource and were told you were not covered, in direct contradiction to what HR told us earlier in the day about the problem being one of reporting and not of coverage. At least one of you was told you had had no coverage since January.

We think it is important to clarify here that while our contract guarantees our healthcare benefits, it is up to OHSU to provide and administer them. For obvious reasons, we aren’t very satisfied with how that’s going. It is unacceptable that we have had so many issues with our health insurance coverage, and we consider getting OHSU to fix these problems to be of the utmost importance. As we stated earlier in the day, we do not consider this matter resolved and will continue to pursue it vigorously to ensure that lapses like the one we saw today do not continue. Thank you to everyone who reached out to us today. Look for more information soon about next steps and how you can help.