Editor:

I really appreciated the fact that an article about the mandatory insurance for international students appeared March 5 on the front page of the Daily Wildcat. I am in a doctoral program at the UA since January 1995, and I was never able to understand why I should pay $300 per semester for an insurance that does not even allow me to be cured at the University Medical Center. A few months ago, I got food poisoning at lunch, and my first idea was to get as soon as possible to the UMC emergency department, but there I could not even be checked in because our Partners Health Plan is only covering the TMC hospital cures. So they asked me to deposit $250 just to be seen by a medical student. I refused and decided to throw up by myself. The fact is that even a graduate student cannot afford to pay $250 for an emergency, and still has to pay $600 a year for a mandatory, "blind" insurance. Nobody has showed me a piece of paper that describes the insurance policies since January 1995.

Also, I need to say that I have my own insurance in my home country (Italy), and I still pay for it because I have a family there. Nobody at the UA asked me if I had one already. This is not fair. For a foreign student it is not even easy to get a second job, or to get a loan to cover expenses like this. I am going to join Maria Karlsson's petition as soon as I can, and I hope that other students will do the same.

It is not true that only in few cases foreign people complain about all this. We need just to ask them. I think that a lot of students go to the Administration Building at the beginning of the semester to pay tuitions and just do not know exactly what they are paying for.

I hope that your staff will continue to try to reveal these problems.

Gianfranco Morelli
geophysical engineering Ph.D candidate