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#1
10-03-2002, 01:28 PM
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Bite my )graduate) student ass, Planned Parenthood of Greater Boston!
This may be kind of incoherent, since this really pisses me off.
Freaking $56 dollars for my quarterly Depo shot. Oh, but if I was making my current income (miniscule stipend) in any sort of job other than being a graduate student and teaching fellow, it would only have been $5, but students (of any sort) don't qualify for your sliding pay scale. Apparently, as a graduate student making $13,500/year, I have a miraculous source of that extra $50 that "real" poor people don't have. Hmm, what could that be? Oh, my parents, you say? I'm supposed to get the money from my parents? I can't believe a fucking Planned Parenthood thinks that anyone who's a student can just call Mommy and Daddy and get the money for their birth control, or STD treatment, or fucking abortion, even. How realistic is that? Nevermind that many undergrads, and most graduate students, are financially independent, or may have parents who can't afford to send their kids money. I know they probably only do this because they get so many students that they can't give them all discounts, but there are all kinds of ways that they could make this system more fair: a separate pay scale for students, somewhere between full and extreme discounted cost; acknowledgement that some students are self-supporting and poor, and setting up a sytem to give those specific students the discount cost (contingent upon some sort of proof, I guess); I'm sure others could think of some more. God, this pisses me off. I'm paying $56 for something that should cost me $5, just because I'm getting an education. Fucking stupid policy. If I'd known I would've lied on the freakin' paperwork. Or put down teacher. THat's what they pay me to do, to help teach a class. 
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#3
10-03-2002, 01:32 PM
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If you want to fix the problem, then use your big phat graduate school education to make a shitload of money, and give a lot of it to Planned Parenthood.
Future not-really-poor grad students will be thanking you ffor centuries to come. 
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#4
10-03-2002, 01:37 PM
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[nosy]How come you're using Planned Parenthood anyway? I get free family planning appointments and could get cheap BC through the student health center. Or do they not supply Depo?[/nosy]
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#5
10-03-2002, 01:37 PM
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Doesn't anyone take out student loans anymore?
Anyway, what do you do for the other 4 months of the year when they don't pay you to teach a class?
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#6
10-03-2002, 01:39 PM
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I also had that problem when I visited a PP in Ohio as a student, Melandry. The next time I went in, I just told them I was unemployed (working ~12 hours a week, I might as well have been). Fees waived, problem solved. Could you try this?
bella
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#7
10-03-2002, 02:40 PM
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Lsura- one of the other grad students in the department gets her Depo through Student Health Services, here and she says it isn't significantly cheaper. I may investigate this option more thoroughly for myself, though.
Since my full tuition is paid in addition to my stipend, the amount of student loans I could receive is minimal because my educational costs are all paid. Also I have no student loans at all from my undergrad education, and I'd sort of like to continue that record. Yes, I know student loans are an option, just like I could find slightly cheaper housing by relaxing some of my requirements in terms of closeness to school, how many people I'm willing to live with, etc. Besides, it's not that I can't, somehow, find the money for this in my budget. If that were the case, I would have found an alternative, cheaper method. It's the principle of the thing- that somehow, Planned Parenthood has arbitrarily decided what I can and can't afford based on my status as a student, not on my actual financial status. For the other four months of the year I get a summer job, generally of the shitty retail variety. This basically only covers my rent, and I must dip into my minimal savings for food and my few other bills.
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#8
10-03-2002, 03:16 PM
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Melandry, why did you tell them you were employed?
Live and learn. Remember, no matter how little you make or how poor you are, many people will consider you overpaid. You may be surrounded by people like you and feel that you really are being screwed but the vast majority of the general public will feel you are fairly or even over paid. I learned that by being a teacher from a shitty paid state (Not Minnesota -- SD  ). Even my own family thought my shitty salary was just fine. I even had a sister who dropped out of high school, never went to college let alone graduated and worked as a teller in a bank. She told me that I was overpaid since I made "almost as much as her"  Even with my background, my first reaction was "$13,500 for a TA is alot of money". Now imagine what someone without my background would think.
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#9
10-03-2002, 04:38 PM
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Huh. The PP here, while yes, if you're a student you're automatically considered a level 2 (I belive), if you show proof that your income level sucks (or is non-existant: as in, the only way you're even in school is because of financial aid) you can get it adjusted down. It's just that the level 2 is a default they use unless you bring them proof to justify otherwise.
But $56? Geeze! It was under $20 for a 7-month supply of pills for me, and it'll be $30-something when my yearly exam comes around, so I'm looking at what... rounding up, $60 a year if that for my needs through PP? I think I apprciate their services even more now! ___ << whee! >>
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#10
10-03-2002, 04:55 PM
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Melandry, the reason the Depo is only $5 for poor people is that they are actually poor. Do you honestly think Depo only costs $5, and that PP is screwing everybody with the $56 price? I would bet that PP is losing money on the $5 price and only wants to do that for those truly in need.
You CHOOSE to go debt free, you CHOOSE higher cost housing, and you complain because those choices leave you without ample disposable income? When you graduate, you're going to be in the clear, no debt, no nothing, just a nice job, right? You make a choice today for benefit tomorrow. I think it's pretty poor form for someone to complain about not getting a handout on birth control when you have an income, pay zero tuition, and are accumulating zero debt for your education. You are in WAY better shape financially than the people who these low cost services are intended for. And.... Shame on all of you who are suggesting she lie to PP in order to get a handout. There is no call for getting PP to spend their resources on someone who doesn't need it. Their resources are not unlimited, every dollar they get cheated on is a dollar they can't spend on a needed service.
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#11
10-03-2002, 06:17 PM
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(Disclaimer -- I was a grad student, but not in Boston, and long enough ago so that a 13K stipend was worth something.)
I agree with Cheesesteak. I know that 13K isn't a lot of income, but the whole point of grad school is that it doesn't last forever. You're not doomed by lack of education or opportunity to be low income forever so your case is dramatically different than many people in that income level. I believe that critical health care and certain other services (e.g. child care) should be provided to graduate students, but birth control is not, strictly speaking one of these services. Sex is not a necessary part of the graduate student experience. (Don't ask how I know this...) Deferred gratification is practically the mantra of every grad student. In this case it may be distressingly apt. That being said, I'm surprised that the school doesn't in some way subsidize birth control.
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#12
10-04-2002, 03:05 PM
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What Cheesesteak said.
Sheesh! If they gave it out to everyone who thought they were "entitled" to it, they wouldn't be able to provide for it in the first place.
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#13
10-04-2002, 03:32 PM
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I'm going to second (or third) Guinastasia and Cheeseteak here.
In addition, you have a stipend and paid tuition. Most of the rest of us had to work our way through school. Fifty-eight dollars a month? That's chicken-feed. Get a damned job to go along with your stipend. You are not poor. You may be a rotten, spoiled kid, but I don't know you well enough to make an informed assesment.
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#14
10-04-2002, 03:49 PM
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Quote:
* Actually, "TA" is often a misnomer, as many grad students have full responsibility for one or more classes -- they're not "assisting" a professor, they are the primary instructor. Moreover, these are usually labor-intensive classes such as freshman comp or introductory foreign language classes, which entail a LOT of homework to grade, class prep time, and conferences with individual students. It may not be a full-time job, but it's close. Most of us earn that $13,500.
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#15
10-04-2002, 04:53 PM
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Ok, even if you all agree that I do not deserve the cheaper price, is there some consensus that somewhere out there is a genuinely poor student of one stripe or another who is getting royally screwed by this policy? That this assumption PP of Greater Boston seems to be making about all students' finances is not necessarily a great idea?
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#16
10-04-2002, 05:34 PM
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Cheesesteak is right. However, I would have a hard time not lying - my ethics are singed. Crap, I don't even donate to charity anymore since I consider the years I spent teaching as pure charity. But...
Cheesesteak is right. I went to grad school and, for Mathematics, working beyond a TA, is not an option. I felt guilty taking two hours to play pool on a Friday night. Yes, the workload was that tough. However, being a TA is not even close to a full time job. You teach 2 classes, usually 6-8 hours a week, through in some prep time (not much since you need to be concerned about your studies first) and 6-8 office hours of which sometimes you can study since no students show. 20 hours tops. More like 15 on normal weeks. Of course, if you truely care about your classes and try to help your students as best you can and spend time coming up with clear well presented lectures....there is a name for those people....grad school dropouts. We had several of these types and NONE of them graduated. You just don't have the time.
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#17
10-04-2002, 06:23 PM
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Quote:
I just finished six years of graduate school. I took out loans. They will take a long time to pay off. The cost of higher education is either loans, poverty or a mix of both.
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#18
10-04-2002, 07:13 PM
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Do you care to explain why this is a ridiculous price to begin with?
PP provides a good service for very inexpensive fees. Can you imagine any other medical service you can get on a sliding scale like PP provides? I realize that Boston is expensive (I'm not exactly living rent-free. Quite the opposite, in fact), but if you can't spring $50 every few months, then maybe sex just isn't worth it to you? Christ, I shelled out for my GF's pills while I was in school without any source of income (already paid for my last semester and was living off of savings from my winter break job). If it meant I didn't get to go out to dinner or pick up a new CD, it was worth it to me. If I didn't want to pay for it, I could have chosen not to. Fancy that.
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#19
10-05-2002, 01:02 PM
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Quote:
BTW, everybody I know is on this schedule, and very few of them drop out of grad school as a result. I think the expectations and culture in math departments must be very different.
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#20
10-05-2002, 01:28 PM
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All the more reason to start experimenting with lesbianism as soon as possible.
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#21
10-05-2002, 10:59 PM
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I'm kinda iffy on this idea that students can't be poor because they will get jobs later.
I have no money. No seriously, I have no money. I can't post date a check by four years, people. Yes, eventually I will have money. Eventually is a pretty key word. Future earnings do not translate to current cash flow, as much as I would like them to. Students can be poor, students for the most part, are poor. I'm sorry but if you are living on ramen and not real sure how you're going to pay rent this month you are poor, if you're 22 and a Chem major or 22 with 4 kids and on welfare. Poor is poor. Its a state, and the chances of it changing with time don't magically make it disappear. Beyond that, Finagle, you say that child care should be paid for, but not birth control? So she should just get pregnant and not worry about a *thing*. And free condoms? Not that I know of, and I prefer to have a back up method that I'm in charge of. I like to take responciblity for my actions, sexual and otherwise. I believe that doing so is the mark of a decent person, and I really don't understand where any of you are getting off saying she should be *less* personally responcible. We won't talk about asking her sex partner(s) to handle the expence, it gets pretty darn demeaning at that stage. (Hey honey, I'd love to but I need fifty bucks to pay for my shot. No money, no nookie.) All in all, there should be an intermediate jump between $5 (the "poor" price) and $58. Or a way to say "I'll pay $5 now and donate the rest when I have that nice job everyone thinks I have now." Luckily, my school's health services have a pretty decent subsidy, I think I paid $24 a shot for Depo. Luck to you.
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#23
10-06-2002, 05:28 AM
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Depo Provera, Brutus. An injectible, synthetic, hormonal contraceptive.
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#24
10-06-2002, 06:02 AM
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Medea, a poor college student is different than a poor person out in the world. College students have made a choice to be there, living a (sometimes) difficult life for their future benefit. The average poor person hasn't made that choice, they are just missing the skills, education, whatever to get a good job.
Certainly some students are poorer than others, Melandry, IMHO, doesn't quite fit the bill for a poor student since she's making a go at her education without widely available student loans. Even poor students (usually) have options, until they exercise those options, I will hold them apart from "true" poor people. I'll give you this, though, if you're doing everything you can to be financially sound, and are still scraping change together to pay for dinner, student or not, you're poor, and deserve the aid of agencies like PP.
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#25
10-06-2002, 07:14 AM
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"The world owes me a living!" -- NOT
Melandry, one reason poor people can get cheap medical care from Planned Parenthood is that people like me donate money to them. I'm not complaining. I donate because I want birth control and abortions to be available. Even more importantly, many employees of PP work there because of their beliefs, not because it's the best job they can get.
So, many cllients of PP are receiving gifts. Somehow the organizaton through an institution makes it harder to see them as gifts. In short, you might conisider an attitude of being grateful to the full-time PP staff and to the whole organization.
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#26
10-06-2002, 07:21 AM
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Yeah, I seem to remember being a TA and working in a damn auto factory in Iowa City (United Technologies Automotive!) during my downtrodden grad school days.
I'm sorry to say but, if you're getting a full ride through grad school and getting some cash you're not in a great position to complain. You think maybe that free ride isn't income? What's the value of it in dollars? Do you pay federal and state taxes on it? - Jonathan "Paid for every penny of his grad school in cash" Chance
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#27
10-06-2002, 09:07 AM
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Count me among those who say that you've got no ground to stand on. You're whining. If sex isn't worth 61 cents a day to you, then try celibacy. Not only does it eliminate the need for contraceptives, I've heard that it can bring about mental and spiritual renewal, which may help you gain a little perspective on why you aren't the equivalent of the genuinely impoverished women who receive the highly subsidized Depo you crave.
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#28
10-06-2002, 10:57 AM
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I don't pay taxes on the full ride element of my fellowship, and I am expressly forbidden by the terms of my fellowship from taking an outside job. If I do so and my department finds out, I lose my fellowship.
Maybe we could just let this thread die now as I am of one opinion about my financial status, and that of students in general, and apparentally the majority disagrees with that. I've been hit over the head with the opinion that I am not poor, but rather a spoiled bitch, enough now, and although I realize pleas of this sort generally do not get respected, but rather lead to more people needing to tell me just how wrong I am, I would really appreciate it if we could speak no more of it. I've listened to your opinions, hard as they are for me to accept, I'm certainly not going to lie to get the cheaper Depo, and I shall not whine about it again in the future.
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#31
10-06-2002, 12:15 PM
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I musta missed soemthing here- Isn't this thread about pp charging more for students because they are students? or that they can get money from their parents? Thats what I got out of it, what does this have to do with a ta's income? When I went to pp I was making about 13,000 and my bc only cost 8.50.
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#32
10-06-2002, 03:37 PM
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Quote:
Melandry I don't claim to know your financial position, and no one else here knows it either.(Nor do you know the position of students in general-nearly everyone I know who went to grad school full-time received some support from their parents. Doesn't mean they all do, or even most, but the fact that the grad students you know don't get help doesn't mean they represent students in general either) But you have to understand, poverty is relative and pp has to set limits on who they will subsidize. When I was a grad student, I only earned about $13,000/year (for the whole year). I would have been eligible for the sliding scale at pp because I never would have listed my occupation as student. I wouldn't have listed my occupation as student because I spent about 9 hours a week in class and 40 hours at the job I needed to pay my tuition. I would have traded paying a couple of hundred dollars a year in birth control costs for a free ride and a TA position in a heartbeat. I don't think you're a spoiled bitch.I just think you're looking at this from the perspective of "If I wasn't a student and I had the same income, I'd be paying $5" while not accounting for the facts that - Planned Parenthood has a limited budget, and cannot do a detailed financial investigation on every student who comes in. I'd bet they ask for no more than a tax return (if they even ask for that). I'd also bet that lots of students who show minimal wages have parents or loans covering a good part of their expenses. -You have options that a non-student making 13,000 doesn't have. Sure, you wouldn't be eligible for much in student loans. But you could get something. And as best as I remember, payments are deferred while you're a full-time student. A non-student making $13,000 a year probably couldn't get a loan, and even if he or she could, the chances are not great that the financial circumstances would improve so quickly that paying the loan back with interest wouldn't cause problems. -Your full-ride is in itself a much greater subsidy than a $5 shot would be. Which is probably the part that caused the reaction you got. You're not only in a better financial position than non-students who earn $13,000, you're in a better position (long-term) than other students who earn $13,000 and have to come up with a way to pay their tuition.
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#33
10-06-2002, 08:56 PM
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Quote:
Sure, sex is fun. Should Planned Parenthood supply cheap birth control to students? I could argue, I think with equal justification, that there should be an organization that supplies cheap Red Sox tickets to poor students.
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#34
10-06-2002, 10:41 PM
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Melandry, you might be getting a subsidied price. When I used Depo last year as a college freshman, I got charged $75 for each shot. Just FYI.
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#35
10-07-2002, 06:36 AM
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Quote:
-Stinkpalm $35k in student loans and climbing, also full time engineer-
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#37
10-07-2002, 07:11 AM
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#39
10-07-2002, 03:32 PM
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I'd like to be a little nicer about my recommendation than some other people.
First, $56 is a subsidized, discounted rate for Depo. I've been on it 8 years and have never paid less than $50. Right now, I'm at a rate of $60/shot. Second, you're looking at a PLANNED expense of less than $240 per year. You said you work summers and whatnot because your stipend only pays 8 months out of the year. Any reason you can't set aside $250 from your summer job and budget that out for your four shots a year? BF can't kick in once in a while? Point being: I think you can subsidize yourself, which is probably why PP doesn't discount students. You're supposed to be more resourceful than the disadvantaged poor. Take a second job. Heck, if you worked at McDonald's for $7/hour, you'd only have to work 33 hours -- say 10 hours a week for three weeks, and your Depo is paid for for the year. (Calculated at 7.50 per hour to account for taxes.) Use your smart grad school brain, pool your resources. You'll think of something.
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#40
10-07-2002, 05:41 PM
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Just out of plain curiosity (and you certainly don't have to answer me if you odn't want because there could be medical/personal reasons you don't feel like getting into) why are you using Depo? There are several forms of birth control that are not nearly as expensive. I mean, I only pay $60 for a whole year's worth of pills.
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#41
10-07-2002, 06:49 PM
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Just to repeat, I am not allowed to get a second job (it's in the terms of my stipend).
pepperlandgirl, I am on Depo because 1) I forget pills 2)my bf and I have some sort of talent at breaking condoms, and yes we've read the directions and are applying them as correctly as we know how 3)I am not interested at all in an IUD: the idea freaks me out. I think that cover sthe main alternate possibilities. So much for this thread dying. I just feel like pretty much all that can be said has been said, essentially.
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#42
10-07-2002, 08:34 PM
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Quote:
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#43
10-07-2002, 09:09 PM
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You've got to be kidding me
You're paying $4.30 per week to not get knocked up. If your boyfriend won't pony up $2.15 per week to help you out on this, you should kick him to the curb and then you won't need any birth control at all.
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