EDITORIAL: Students' insurance plan should cover HPV vaccine

HPV should be covered

By:

Posted: 3/13/07

It's a staggering statistic: 45 percent of 14-to-19-year-old women are infected with a human papillomavirus, according to a study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Here's two more: Four forms of HPV, a sexually transmitted infection that can be passed on even if partners use a condom, are the culprits in about 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital wart cases.

But there's some good news. A new vaccine protects against those four forms of the virus. The bad news is that it's expensive, totaling $360. And the worst is that our student insurance plan-which we are required to purchase if we don't carry coverage that meets the state's requirements-doesn't cover it.

In fact, the Qualifying Student Health Insurance Plan, run by MEGA Life and Health Insurance Plan, doesn't cover any preventive immunizations, despite well-established evidence that they improve health while lowering long-term healthcare costs.

Even the new vaccine, with a price several times that of other recommended vaccinations, has been shown to be a cost-effective way of improving health. That means preventing some of the roughly 14,000 cases of cervical cancer diagnosed every year, and the 4,000 lives such cancers claim annually. (Not to mention the countless outbreaks of genital warts averted.)

Doctors recommend that women under 26 receive the three-part vaccination. But its high cost is proving prohibitive for those students who request it at the Health Center only to be told that their insurance doesn't cover it-and that its price is as staggering as the very rates of HPV infection the vaccine could reduce.

The company has told representatives at the Health Center that covering the vaccine would increase its premium by a yet-to-be-determined amount. We understand that providing more services means higher costs in the short run, but such calculations miss two crucial points.

First, that a higher rate of vaccination now means lower spending to treat cervical cancers and genital warts later. (Unfortunately, insurances companies have little financial incentive to cover the cost of the vaccine.) And with a high co-payment for the vaccine, any premium increases should be minimal.

Second, students without their own insurance are only offered this policy. Its supplier-as well as those in the health center who selected it-should, therefore, have an increased responsibility to ensure that the policy provides reasonable measures to preserve its subscriber's health. That clearly includes the new vaccine.

There are some other plans that do not cover the injections. But the plan our students rely on for their health shouldn't be one of them.