Students pay a flat fee in September to use UHS for the whole year. The fee was $325 this year and will rise to $350 by next year, according to Helena E. Hart, financial officer to UHS.

A student who pays the fee can use UHS whenever he wants, and he is covered for most health services for the whole year. He will only have to pay for some medical work done at UHS. He will have to pay for dental work, and for some optometry services.

A student can decline to pay the fee and opt for medical care at some other health service or at a private practice if he wishes.

In 1984, the student fees brought in over $2 million to UHS while the fees paid by the faculty and staff at Harvard, which are matched partially by Harvard University, came out to nearly $5 million.

This large amount of money enables UHS to offer a lot of the services which are generally missing at other university health systems. "Most other university health services just have a walk-in clinic, and that's it," says Wacker.

UHS, on the other hand, offers dental service, mental health service and orthopedics service, among other things. And it is this wide range of services which Postel thinks people will appreciate when they discover that UHS is more than just a walk-in clinic.

A Bad Experience?

However, there are still some students who complain that the delays and the impersonal service at UHS are not their main concern. They say the problem is the health care the doctors provide.

Some students either have heard bad stories about UHS or have had bad experiences there which have convinced them the place does not serve sound medical care.

"I have heard bad rumors about the place. I trust them for minor illnesses, but for more serious stuff, I don't think I'd go," says Betty Knapp '86.

"My roommate last year went into UHS complaining that he had chicken pox. The doctor told him that the last thing he could possibly have was chicken pox. And then he contracted the worst case of chicken pox that UHS saw all last year," says Richard F.F. Nichols II '86.

"Freshman year, I broke my ankle," says a Harvard student who asked not to be named. "They took an X-ray, and they said I had no fracture. I could see the fracture in the picture, and they told me there was no fracture. So I took the X-ray to another doctor, and he put me in a cast for six weeks."

Accounts like these have an affect on the people who hear them and cause distrust of UHS's services.

"We serve a closed community here at Harvard," says Patient Educator Kathleen M. Kniepmann, "and when someone has a bad experience, word spreads about very fast. If a person hears a bad story, he may very well decide, 'Well, I'm not going to go to UHS for my health care.'"

In response to some of these "horror stories," director Wacker says that UHS receives some of its best compliments for the care it provides for its patients who have more serious illnesses than those usually treated in the walk-in clinic. He refers specifically to the Stillman Infirmary as a UHS service which receives very good compliments.