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Members: Stay up to date with health benefits-related announcements by clicking here. We’ve compiled some specifics and recent changes to your benefits.

COVID-19 TESTING

Highmark is covering all COVID-19 testing at 100% when recommended by a medical professional. That means copays, deductibles, and coinsurance do not apply for most plans.

PRESCRIPTIONS

Be smart and check your supply of prescription medicines. If you have prescription coverage through Highmark, you can now obtain 30-day refills for your maintenance medications before their refill date — your plan will cover these refills. Your pharmacist can help you get additional refills. We also encourage you to take advantage of the 90-day mail order refill benefit that most plans now offer.

TELEMEDICINE

Effective March 21, the Highmark Blue Shield PPO plan includes an in-network telemedicine benefit, which allows you to have a live virtual visit with a healthcare provider. For a limited time, the $10 virtual visit member copay will be waived for Highmark’s telemedicine vendors. This includes mental and physical health.

The UPMC HMO plan already includes live virtual visits. Between now and June 11, 2020, the $20 member copay for AnywhereCare visits is waived.

United Concordia Dentistry offers teledentistry to all of its groups. Currently, most providers are only seeing patients for emergencies. For guidance on determining if your dental concern qualifies as an emergency, click here.

DEPENDENTS

Healthcare coverage for enrolled dependents who turned age 26 in March 2020 will be extended through May 31, 2020. Similarly, healthcare coverage for enrolled dependents who turn age 26 in April 2020 will be extended through June 30, 2020. There is no action for you to take for your dependent’s coverage to continue.

Dental and vision benefits for enrolled dependents who turned 26 in March 2020 and those who will turn 26 in April 2020 will be extended by two months (May 31 and June 30 respectively). The Health & Welfare Fund acknowledges that it may take some time to implement this change.

HEALTHY U

Finally, for those who have not yet completed Healthy U, the requirement has been changed to the RealAge Test only. Please refer to the April 1 email sent by State System Employee Benefits for more information.

—Bim Arthun,
director of membership services

From noon today until further notice, State office staff members are working remotely due to COVID-19 precautions. They remain accessible via phone and email. Click here for our staff directory. Thank you for your patience as we respond to your messages and calls as soon as we are able.

This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. Photo/Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM via Public Health Image Library

Individual Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education universities determine their COVID-19-related closures, moves online, and other changes. For questions about your campus’ plans or protocol, please contact your university. Find links to university COVID-19 pages on this State System page.

We’d planned to post today about an April rally in support of Gov. Tom Wolf’s Nellie Bly Scholarship program, proposed in his 2020–21 budget. Wolf’s plan would provide scholarships to Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education students and help graduates earn their degrees with little to no student debt.

But with ongoing uncertainty and safety issues of COVID-19, we decided today to stop planning and to cancel the rally.

Our devotion to providing affordable, quality public higher education has not dwindled, however, and we remain strong supporters of Wolf’s plan (as well as Pennsylvania Promise legislation already in the Pennsylvania House and Senate). While you can cross our April rally off your calendar, there are still ways you can continue to advocate for the Nellie Bly plan:

• Sign our petition in support of the rally
• Share your story/support on social media. Use #fundPAfuture (and #NellieBlyScholarship, too, if you have space) and let everyone know why you support the Nellie Bly Scholarship.
• Share your story with APSCUF. Email outlining how a $10,000 scholarship would help you and what having less college debt would mean to you.
• Contact your legislators and tell them to support the Nellie Bly Scholarship plan. Click here to find your legislators.

APSCUF sent the following letter to University of California President Janet Napolitano; John A. Pérez, chair of the board of regents of the University of California; and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Feb. 27, 2020

On behalf of the faculty and coach members of the Association of Pennsylvania State Colleges and University Faculties (APSCUF) who work at Pennsylvania’s fourteen public universities, I write to express our support for graduate students at the Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Davis campuses of the University of California, who are on strike demanding a cost of living adjustment in order to afford housing.

Students at Santa Cruz indicate that half are spending upwards of 60% of their stipends just on housing. Many report having to live an hour commute from the university just to find rents they can afford; others are living in cars. Food insecurity is a problem, as is access to affordable medical care because the stipends are so low. According to their calculations, a single person needs to earn over $32,000/year to escape poverty conditions, while the stipend is just over $21,000. The situations in Santa Barbara and Davis are just as serious. These situations are well-documented and publicly available.

Compounding the situation, system leadership’s response to the graduate students’ demands has been insufficient and in some cases deeply troubling. Administration’s initial claim that union contracts precluded negotiating a COLA were untrue, and belied by offers to do so if the graduate students called off the strike on February 11. The students rejected that offer on the grounds that a meeting “to discuss financial resources” was too non-committal to address their very real concerns about being able to afford to live right now.

More distressing was President Napolitano’s threat, issued February 14, to fire striking graduate students on February 21 if the graduate students hadn’t submitted grades. Threatening such draconian discipline against a group for trying to solve a serious problem in the only way left to them — since the university/system refused to discuss it despite repeated requests for months — is misguided at best. How would anyone’s situation improve if you actually did fire them? Given that the Doomsday deadline has come and gone, it seems you may have realized that enforcing the threat would be a bad idea.

As the strike spreads to other campuses, APSCUF calls on the system leadership and Governor Newsom to work with students who believe their good-faith efforts to resolve their financial difficulties have been met with silence and threats to find a resolution that actually solves the problem instead of simply returning to the status quo. Your graduate students cannot afford to live. You need to pay them more. We stand with them for as long as it takes for you to see your way to the obvious conclusion.

Sincerely,
Dr. Kenneth M. Mash
APSCUF president