Oh man! Have I got a story on schools and Immunizations!

My grad school was CU Anschutz Med Campus. They also require immunization records to attend in the event of an outbreak. This is important as it is a med-campus and there are a lot of sick people, immuno-compromised people, infants, and a CDC infectious disease center. If you are not immunized, you will be staying at home in the event of an outbreak and you will fail your finals.

There were a few issues though.

One was that you had to send in your immunization records. Per various rules in various bureaucracies, Kaiser in CA would only send out faxes. CU-AMC would not ever accept a fax. Both cited HIPAA law as the reason. Many of the students, including the med students, spent years figuring these things out as each hospital system battled it out from the various states and countries that students came from. No joke, it took me just over 3 semesters to get it hammered out, about 1.5 years. Eventually, my records were sent out via snail-mail.

The second issue was the bilking of the students. Every single student that I personally knew was told that their MMR titers were out of date (essentially, the test to see if you are in fact immunized). Thus, they needed to get their titers pulled again. So, we all go down to the students' nurses office to get the titers pulled. Every single student is then told that they are deficient in their titers. So, we all then go to get our MMR booster shots. Wham, bam, you now have your booster shot. Mind you, this is all personal stuff. You don't really talk about it over lunch. Nothing was amiss to anyone at this point.

Then, the ~ $500 bill came to us. Yes, really. $500 for an MMR booster shot. Looking closer, it's not that the shots were themselves $500, the vaccine was itself free. It was the administration of the shots. Having that nurse give you the shot, a 5 minute process, was $500 after the student health insurance kicked in. Every single student I knew also received one of these bills.

Understandably outraged at this, we all go to our respective department heads and ask what the hell is going on. They, also are surprised. After a few months of meetings and whatnot, my department states that they will pay out for our costs. Nice, but not that it mattered. Many of us, waiting on these things to suss out, were sent to collections. Lab phones were ringing off the hook, PIs and advisors were getting calls from scummy collectors about our debts, there were loads of very threatening emails sent to official university addressed, etc. The insurance that the students all went through was not going to budge, you had to pay out. It was a mess.

Some of the other departments decided to try to just have the students sign religious waivers for the next incoming class. This worked. That next class that was in a department that had the students go off and sign waivers didn't have to deal with this nonsense. My department was not one of them. As such, some of my new lab-mates got ~ $700 bills for the MMR boosters (I assume the upped the price to make-up for lost revenue, but have no proof). My new lab mates had to go through all the rigmarole as I had to as well, with debt collectors, lazy departments, and bad billing.

Well, then all the departments figured this out. All the students are told to just go down and get religious waivers for the shots. This includes the med students, the dental students, the NPs, etc. This bypasses the insane student health insurance (no idea why it was still there after this, but, again, bureaucrats). In the event of an outbreak, all the students will need to stay home and fail all of their classes.

So, AFAIK, all/most of the students at CU-AMC are on religious waivers as of today, due to scummy insurance and a bureaucratic fight with the various departments.