This new U-M-provided health insurance plan is but one more example of how the U-M is becoming just another package-and-dispenser product and service for a captive mass of passive consumers. The aim of making this insurance plan mandatory is to force enough students' parents to foot an extra $700 (and probably more) into the program so that it will become profitable. Profits will then be invested in expanding the already rampant U-M health care bureaucracy which will create the demand for even higher premiums for parents to pay.
I was an undergraduate student here when the University of Michigan regents first instituted the by now loved U-M police department (the Department of Public Safety) and the EntrŽe Plus debit card "option." What this wide array of University-provided products and services does is to drive up the costs of attending the U-M to the point that fewer parents can afford to send their children here and those that can must get high-interest private bank loans (since Congress is cutting back student loans) and take second mortgages on their homes in order to do so. The net result of reinventing the U-M as a packager and dispenser of products and services which have absolutely nothing to do with University education is to make a high quality instruction less accessible for the people the University is supposed to serve.
This reinvention of the U-M through mandatory consumption programs like U-M health care helps advance the health care-industrial complex's agenda of conditioning young people to become life-long passive consumers of their products and services, much in the same way that beer companies sponsor spring break events at popular resort areas banking that students participating in them will continue drinking their beer long after their college days. The U-M's commodification of all these products in a maize and blue wrapper is a low-blow, slick-ass marketing technique in that it conditions students to believe that consuming all of this superfluous garbage is a basic necessity of student life at the U-M (and by now, it probably is). Welcome to the Information/Service Age hyperconsumption!
- Luis Hidalgo