To Chancellor Drake and Executive Vice President Gottfredson,

 It has come to our attention that you have a meeting scheduled to continue plans for implementing a move to student health. The GSHIP committee is extremely disappointed that once again the Administration has excluded the GSHIP committee from this process. According to our guidelines approved by the Chancellor, all interaction involving the brokers should be directed by the GSHIP committee. "Establishing a selection process for the Insurance Broker of Record (Broker)…The broker is expected to exclusively represent the interests of the GSHIP Committee and is responsible for obtaining insurance bids and other requested information (GSHIP protocols). " Meeting with the brokers and the insurance company without the committee violates the GSHIP guidelines that were agreed upon when GSHIP was formed.

The GSHIP committee is responsible for making recommendations about graduate student health insurance; while the Chancellor has the right to veto any recommendations, the GSHIP Committee also has the right to revise the recommendations in the face of a veto. The GSHIP committee was formed with  a majority graduate student representation to keep the University from making arbitrary decisions without graduate student input and to ensure that graduate student interests are upheld as well as those of the University. The disregard for procedure laid out in the guidelines gravely concerns the GSHIP committee. It appears that the Administration is not interested in student representation in our health insurance plan selection and implementation process and has no intention of respecting the agreements made by past Chancellors.

GSHIP as a mandatory health insurance plan for all graduate student was formed through a student vote organized by AGS. Students approved this plan in part because the proposal included setting up a committee with a student majority to oversee the plan design and bidding processes to ensure that GSHIP is administered in graduate students' best interests. The Administration's continued effort to exclude graduate students from important decisions regarding UCI's GSHIP plan makes it impossible for AGS to ensure that the interests of its constituency are adequately considered.