Without a doubt, the new SAC health and dental insurance plan is an improvement over its predecessor. The new plan, which was announced during frosh week, covers all the things the old one did, and it costs less. It improves service in a few key areas, as it now offers 100 per cent coverage of prescription drugs. It also offers-and this should have been a no-brainer 10 years ago–coverage for birth-control pills (or “oral contraceptives” as the Sacucrats insist on saying). All this, and it costs almost $50 less per person.

SAC President Ashley Morton and VP Operations Alexandra Artful-Dodger deserve a lot of the credit for bringing in the new plan. On a tight schedule, they cracked the whip and got the SAC herd moving in a unified direction, looked at the available options, and sealed the deal, all in the space of a few months. They achieved, in Artful-Dodger’s words, “a rare moment of consensus.”

The sudden and thorough success of the new plan, however, has highlighted the rottenness of the plan it replaced, and the messy business that brought about its replacement.

The reason for scrapping the previous insurance policy was simple: SAC discovered in June that its insurance broker, Cherian & Company, was receiving an 11 per cent commission. On a plan which cost almost $4 million last year, that meant that Cherian had received upwards of $400,000, and people rightly thought this amount too high.

But why was this a surprise? Cherian had been doing business with SAC since 1987, the year that the health plan was instituted (that year, students paid just two dollars to be insured). And during that time, not a soul at SAC has ever known how much Cherian & Company was making.

Did it not occur to anyone-15 consecutive SAC presidents, several paid health plan administrators, business managers and other staff, not to mention SAC’s pricey lawyers—to simply ask what the fee was?

The answer, from everyone The Varsity spoke to, was a simple “no.”

Brokerage fees, we are told, are traditionally negotiated between insurance providers (last year Liberty Health) and insurance brokers (last year Cherian), and the paying customer (SAC, i.e. you and me) is ignorant of that fee. “That’s just the way it works,” we are told, and we’re expected to simply shrug our shoulders and move on.

That’s not good enough.

Too many people at SAC over the years simply shrugged their shoulders and moved on without bothering to ask the questions that clearly needed to be asked. Their complacency will cost us now, because SAC will very likely be sued by Cherian for terminating their contract. And the real kicker is, any settlement they reach will be paid for with the money SAC saved by changing health plans-money that has already come out of your pocket.

Let’s give credit where credit is due: Morton and Artful-Dodger asked the right questions. It’s a shame it took so long, and cost so much.