Unfortunately our hands are tied when it comes to reallocating funding.

The savings from our Health Plan will not be passed on to students if this referendum doesn’t pass. It will go into our reserve fund (which already has over a million dollars).

The proposed fees are a result of months of consultations with students groups and councilors. The current fees are a mess, and have no rationale when it comes to por-ratedness, opt-outs, etc. The proposed system will fix all of this.

As for the health plan, the AMS recently switched providers and managed to negotiate a better price for the same coverage. Therefore, no coverage is being immediately lost as a result of the $14.00 decrease. In a sense, it’s the AMS trying to pass on the savings to students (while clawing back those savings at the same time).

However, whether it results in cuts to coverage or reduced flexibility in the future remains to be seen. The AMS re-negotiates their health plan annually. If there were to be a large increase in claims in coming years, it’s possible the insurance companies would raise the price for the coverage we currently receive beyond what the AMS can afford on the reduced fee. In that case, cuts might have to be made to the health plan to meet the price point of the fee. It might happen or it might not. There’s absolutely no way to predict it on a 5 or 10-year horizon.

What is the cost of this change? What are we losing for it? What is the motivation behind this decision?

The changes generally do what they say on the box. Records restrictions do go a little beyond the existing policy but aren’t nearly as bad when they were first drafted, quorum lowering has both benefits and drawbacks (Also, they say they couldn’t pay for a ~1,000 person AGM because it could only be in the Chan, but there are at least 3 other, cheaper places it could potentially be held.) The no-removing-executives alteration just reinforces what’s already there. The part about executive remuneration crosses out a portion mandating paying execs an archaic amount no sane person would do the job for ($200) and actually closes a funny little loophole that might require paying, say, an MBA student’s entire yearly tuition if s/he were to be elected to exec.

It’s true, though our annual expenses are around $100 for servers, domains, and special projects. The winnings from VFM go into our pockets as an incentive to keep it up. We’re not ‘reliant’ on the income. I project we could raise at least our VFM winnings annually from donation drives (but we’d rather focus efforts on content, rather than business, because that’s not the point.)

Used to be and being are very different things.

Oh, also, it was a joke. Hence the FOXTROTian allcaps.

Also, don’t forget that 3/4 of the Insider’s team used to sit on AMS Council. And that 2/4 having been actual Execs (no names).

You used to be “the man” Alex, don’t be so quick to forget that ;)

(Note: I am not implying that the article is biased. Far from it. I’m just pointing out the obvious.)