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Health Insurance and the Ongoing Economic Crisis

Posted by Anonymous, Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

By Jim Brown, The Actors Fund

With the dramatic downturn in the economy at the last quarter of 2008, the Artists Health Insurance Resource Center (AHIRC) has seen a dramatic rise in the number of artists contacting us for assistance in finding coverage or, if unable to afford it, reasonably priced health care.
 
 
The main source of health insurance for most working Americans is a union or an employer. For artists, however, the main sources are a spouse or partner’s employer, insurers selling individual plans, and arts and self-employed persons associations. And, because health insurance in this country has been tied so closely to employment since World War II (when benefits like health insurance were used to offset the effects of wage freezes), coverage all too often ends when the job ends, affecting not just the employee, but the entire family. Sadly, the ability to access insurance through these resources has been and will continue to be impacted negatively by the deep recession.
 
The following three cases have come through the Actors Fund in recent months and illustrate how seriously stifled access to health care and health insurance options has become.
 
  • A 41 year old sculptor in Georgia and his wife were recently faced with losing their health insurance when she was laid off from her job at a local library, joining the more than 530,000 workers who lost their employment in the month of November.    The extension of insurance through COBRA, in which the employee has the right to keep the insurance (usually for up to 18 months) by paying the full premium, is extremely expensive, in this case over $900 a month for the couple. With the loss of the wife’s income, and with expectations of severely reduced commissions and sales of his work, COBRA was not a viable option. The couple opted for catastrophic insurance with a five thousand dollar deductible for each of them. One of the problems with this type of insurance is the tendency of those who have this coverage to delay or simply not receive care because the out-of-pocket cost is too high.
  • A 56 year old musician in Los Angeles has purchased an HMO plan directly from Kaiser Permanente for the past eight years. The cost, which is currently $439 a month, has increased every year by eight to twelve percent, with the increase reaching almost twenty percent when he turned 40 and then 45. In the past six months he has had almost no work. He is no longer able to afford the premium while continuing to pay his other expenses. He is afraid to drop his insurance since a current chronic illness, which would be considered a pre-existing condition, would make him uninsurable in the future. He says he will continue to try to shave away at his other living costs while hoping the economy improves and the new administration acts quickly on health care reform.
  • A 28 year old actress in New York, who makes most of her income from a combination of temp work, house cleaning and freelance web design, was unable to afford the least expensive HMO plan from HIP, which is $604 a month and rumored to be going above $700 in 2009. Fortunately, there are several organizations in the city that offer less expensive plans to artists and other self-employed people. But the one that offered the plan she wanted requires that she show an income of at least $10,000 in the past six months from her self-employment, which she would have been able to do a year ago but not now, having been hit hard by the decaying economy. On the other side, her income is above the $26,400 limit that would allow her to purchase a government-subsidized Healthy NY plan for about $260. Currently uninsured, she uses the free health clinic operated by The Actors Fund in Manhattan and participates in a sliding-scale program at city hospitals.
At AHIRC, we are seeing more visual and performing artists whose incomes are coming close to the level that would make them eligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs, just when many states are facing huge deficits and plan to drastically reduce funding for safety-net programs. At the same time, contributions to charities that help artists through emergency grants, such as The Actors Fund, have fallen precipitously.
 
For ten years it has been the mission of the Artists Health Insurance Resource Center to have every artist in this country insured. The critical state of the economy is making that goal more difficult than ever. Without a comprehensive change in the health insurance system, made at the level of the federal government, we believe it will be impossible to achieve this. Artists throughout the country need to unite to demand and participate in a solution. We should not allow the fear of an ongoing economic crisis distract us from pushing for fundamental health care reform.
 
The Obama team has touted its unprecedented openness and transparency. Everyone needs to take advantage of this opportunity to participate in shaping new policies. Write letters to your representatives in congress to demand quality health care for all artists. Continue to raise your concerns on www.whitehouse.gov. Do whatever you can to keep health care on the minds of our elected officials until every person has access.

 

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