Watch the Regents' Health Services Committee Session of Feb. 14

As blog readers will know, the Regents originally had a Health Services Committee session scheduled for February 14th, an off-cycle meeting. Because there was leftover business related to online education from the January meetings, a full Board session to deal with that topic was later added to the agenda for that day. We have already covered the Board segment.*

We now (belatedly) turn to the Health Services segment. That segment began with public comment. Topics covered were several anti-Israel statements, antisemitism and departmental statements, online courses, FAFSA problems for undocumented students, Teamsters issues, recovery programs for addiction, divestment from Blackstone and hotels, funding for CARE (sexual assault) programs, anti-abortion, Blackrock, UC jobs for undocuments students, arrest of students at the prior meeting, and an alleged "extortion" at UC-Santa Barbara. A demonstration followed and a request to clear the room was made. It was unclear what happened at that point; the protesters may have left voluntarily.

There were then two items on the agenda: A strategic framework for UC Health and Student health services. It was noted that the latter was run separately from the former, even on campuses that have med centers. While there was no unhappiness with the strategic plan, there were comments from some Regents that it should be more detailed. The problem of overloaded ERs was noted. Acquisitions and affiliations were included in the strategy. Yours truly would have expected more questions about acquisitions and how management control and quality would be handled in a growing system.

With regard to student health, it was noted that the insurance system was in deficit. Students post-pandemic have substantially increased use of costly ERs and decreased routine non-ER visits. There was a suggestion that perhaps the deductible for ER visits needed to be raised. It was suggested that some kind of survey be undertaken to determine if students who have non-UC insurance are exhibiting similar behavior to those with UC students insurance.

As always we preserve recordings of the Regents since the Regents have no policy on how long they will retain their recordings. You can see the Health Services Committee meeting at:

https://ia801308.us.archive.org/9/items/health-services-committee_202402/Health%20Services%20Committee.mp4.

The general link for the webside containing both the Health Services and the full board meetings is:

https://archive.org/details/health-services-committee_202402.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2024/02/watch-regents-full-board-meeting-of-feb.html.