Re: {JTM} Medical insurance?

[Tracy Record, WSB Editor]

if anyone knows - I'm in!
we are paying $550/month for catastrophic high-deductible health insurance for our family of 3. it is not good for ANYTHING but (heaven forbid) catastrophes ... if we have to go to the doctor for anything routine, it would be straight out of our pocket, separately. Just seems nuts. But OTOH I remind myself, we're lucky to be able to at least afford THAT.

TR, making-it-up-as-we-go-along in W. Seattle

--- On Sat, 4/11/09, Maurreen Skowran <maurree...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Maurreen Skowran <maurree...@yahoo.com>
> Subject: {JTM} Medical insurance?
> To: "Journalism That Matters" <jtm...@googlegroups.com>
> Date: Saturday, April 11, 2009, 12:00 AM
>
> I wonder how many people are needed to get a group
> discount.
>
> I seldom go to the doctor, but I know that even relatively
> small
> things can add up quickly.
>
> We have about 200 members.
>
> I haven't even thought about insurance much, except I was
> talking with
> someone today who is losing his job.
>
>
> >
>

[Steve Hanson]

Tracy Record, WSB Editor wrote:
> if anyone knows - I'm in!
> we are paying $550/month for catastrophic high-deductible health insurance for our family of 3. it is not good for ANYTHING but (heaven forbid) catastrophes ... if we have to go to the doctor for anything routine, it would be straight out of our pocket, separately. Just seems nuts. But OTOH I remind myself, we're lucky to be able to at least afford THAT.
>

The problem won't be the numbers - the problem will be that we're all in
different states, and we're really not any sort of a legal
organization. If we were a 501(c)3 and were all in one state this would
be pretty straightforward. I belong to a number of national
organizations that offer group health benefits, but none of them can,
for example, offer insurance in Wisconsin.

[Persephone Miel]

The problem is that the insurance companies continue to hold our
politicians hostage so that any reforms that happen will include
them, as they did here in Massachusetts, which is a recipe for
failure.

We need universal single-payer, i.e., Medicare for all. Something that
the majority of both ordinary citizens and physicans support
(depending to some extent on how you phrase the question) but that
politicians are still afraid even to mention.

It's one of those issues I've always wished online media would pick up
and use to prove its democratic power.

Lots of good material here, if anybody wants stuff to comment on/point
to; http://www.pnhp.org/news/quote_of_the_day.php

Sorry, I know this is off-topic, but as someone with a major
pre-existing condition (breast cancer a few years ago), keeping
really good health insurance has determined a lot of my career choices
in the last couple years and it really annoys me.

Persephone

--
Persephone Miel
skype: fonchik
www.mediarepublic.org

[Bill Densmore]

I don't usually post, nor post long, but health care is an issue we all
have to weigh in on. It's bankrupting democracy, slowly.

First, to add a little perspective. We Massachusetts, I have Blue
Cross/Blue Shield for a family of four. It is an individual plan, but it
is "community rated" which means the premium is essentially the same as if
I were in a group in our geography. It's $1,200 a month and there is a
$1,000-a-year copay for each family member; and a $2,000 aggregate family
copay. That means the first $2,000 of health care we consume each year is
on our own nickel. After that there's a small deductible per
visit/incident. If we wanted to pay about $1,400 a month, the aggregate
copays would go away -- so it is six of one, half dozen of the other.

Health costs -- a tax

Any company that was insuring you, was probably spending $10,000 or more a
year in recently years, minus any co-pay you were subjected to. It is just
a gigantic cost of doing business now. It's a tax for all practical
purposes, because if you have any sense of responsibility to you family
you have to pay it if you can afford.

I for one can't believe the "tax" would be lower if there was a single
payer. But, that would also mean some "rationalization" of health care by
the government, pushing people who want premium health care into
excess-and-surplus private options.

I don't see how different that is from what we have today -- really poor,
underemployed people get only "free care" -- what hospitals provide as a
matter of social mission; the middle class gets pretty good care but at
outrageous cost to them or to their employer (which is them, ultimately),
and those with premium policies and lots of savings get all the care they
want (and even some they rationally probably don't need).

What really changes?

In a single-payer system things don't change that much -- poor people get
a little better basic coverage for free, the middle/ upper-middle class
gets fine coverage with zero hassle (perhaps some wait time on elective
procedures for non-life-threatening conditions) and the wealthy people
still get to buy whatever they want from a there will continue to be a
market for "premium health care" for private-pay patients.

The only thing that changes is you replace the bureaucracy of a multipayer
system, and all the wrong incentives, with the bureaucracy of a
single-payer, government supervised system. And the bet we all make is
purely idealogy absent rational discussion of line by line costs and
incentives in either direction.

From ideology to economics -- Can we shift the debate?

And this is the question: Do you believe the government (that us,
remember!) can do a better job of supervising a base-line essential public
service than private stockholders can? The single payer could, I suppose,
be a public utility (like an electric company) with carefully supervised
rates and services, but that feels like the wrong model. Managing health
care is different than provisioning electricity.

So, what could JTM do to enable a principled, national consideration of
the costs of the current system vs. the reasonable forseeable costs of a
single-payer system -- without idealogy. I might prefer "to keep the
government out of health care" ideologically. But at what
dollars-and-sense cost? What would be my annual tax for health care if I
stopped having to pay $1,200 a month for our family's health insurance
(plus up to $2,000 in outapocket annually)?

That's a piece of journalism I would read.

Besides using this Google Group, which works pretty well, if you have
anythign to add that works better in a wiki format, you can add it here:

http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-health-insurance

And encourage others to add.

At some point, it might be worth forming an association, for the purpose
alone of negotiating a national group rate.

-- bill

-------------------------------------
Bill Densmore, director/editor
The Media Giraffe Project
Univ. of Massachusetts
OFF: 413-577-4370 / CELL: 413-458-8001

[Bill Densmore]

Proofread Bill! -- I meant to say that I for one can't believe the tax
would be "higher" if there were a single-payer system. I think a
single-payer system would be cheaper administratively.

[caheidelberger]

Well, Bill, one estimate says a public health plan would save you 20%:
http://madvilletimes.blogspot.com/2009/03/private-insurance-cant-compete-with.html

Instead of $1200 a month, how about $960? (Plus, a public plan likely
can't reject you for pre-existing conditions). You could also sample
some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did a while back based on
Medicare contributions from my paycheck:
http://madvilletimes.blogspot.com/2007/06/save-money-universalize-health-care.html

Universal health care also appears to save lives:
http://www.everybodyinnobodyout.org/FAQ/fqIntl.htm

Universal health care saves money and saves lives: you can't get much
less ideological than that. :-)

CAH

[Maurreen Skowran]

Are any JTM members also members of the American Society of
Journalists and Authors?

ASJA offers some help:
http://www.asja.org/benefits/health.php

[Chris O'Brien]

Bill:

I certainly agree with the analysis about the costs of healthcare. It's outrageous, it's inefficient, and it's causing all sorts of problems, especially for small businesses. And worse, lots of people simply aren't getting the care they deserve.

But here's why I believe in national, single-payer healthcare.

I'll start with my family's own experience. We chose to have both of our kids at home using a midwife. The cost, in each case, was $5,000. We paid that out of pocket. What we got in return was weekly visits from the midwife for two months before the before, the birth itself, and then about 10 post-natal visits. That's the kind of care that no private doctor would provide. But what's worse, is that the cost alone of the one-night stay in a hospital for the birth is 2 to 3 three times as much. Hospitals have turned birth into a huge profit center for a variety of reasons. And much worse, the rates of c-sections are dramatically rising, because there is a premium on moving woman through the process as fast as possible. So this profit-driven model is skewing the system badly, creating unnecessary costs while diminishing quality of care.

Yet, in our current system, despite the fact that homebirths are dramatically less expensive and just as safe (I know some will debate this, but...), no insurance company will cover them.

The second piece is technology. The medical industry still largely runs on a paper-based system. And what technology exists is not well integrated. Getting information from one provider to another is cumbersome due to systems that won't work together. the technology and systems exists that would dramatically lower costs and create much greater efficiencies. but of course, for-profit systems are reluctant to make the short-term investments, and to work with people they see as competitors, to adopt much of this. So change is incremental at best.

There are other pieces to this. And it is vastly complex. But in this case, central, rationalized planning has the potential to deliver big savings AND better care. The market-approach created the HMO model, which no one in the healthcare system is happy about, but that we all seem to be stuck with.

Best,

Chris O'Brien
Oakland, CA

[Chris O'Brien]

Let me recommend that folks check out the National Writer's Union. I used to be a member, and my wife used to work there. They offer membership on a sliding scale:

http://www.nwu.org/nwu/?cmd=showPage&page_id=1.1.23

And they also offer a group insurance and benefits plan. I haven't been a member in awhile, but several years ago, their rates were quite reasonable:

http://www.nwu.org/nwu/?cmd=showPage&page_id=1.3.18.4

I believe they get pretty good rates by being part of the AFL-CIO.

They also offer a host of other service, like legal advice and discussion groups that are free to members.

best,

Chris O'Brien

[borges]

I hope all those newly out-of-work journalists who lost the cushion of
health benefits will put a fine point on the effects of minimal
coverage at such high prices. It is a story that needs to be made real
to those in power who have no way to relate to the poorly served by
our health care system. My husband is a family doctor here in a poor
county in WI. Being in primary care he is on the front line of trying
to serve people in a frugal way, but in a system that seems to have
been designed by drunken sailors.

A side note, I was just talking to my husband about whether the health
care industry and insurance is the next bubble and what its collapse
might look like. This could be the next big story. That, or the
green industry that is being launched with such abandon.

[rlo...@sfsu.edu]

In case this is helpful...

the national writers union (www.nwu.org) offers some group health
insurance in some states -- but they DO offer national dental and
vision, which is a start.

Media bistro offers something in select areas as well.

Yeah, health insurance is the real thing that gets you...especially
with those wonderful pre-existing conditions clauses

Ronnie

Perhaps Quoting borges <adm...@kicktime.org>:

[Maurreen Skowran]

Thanks for all the input on this.

I wonder about the potential for working with The Newspaper Guild on
this. If something develops, it might also help out-of-work pressmen
and others.

[AmySenk]

This is a huge issue for me, and one that I have asked my journalism
school to focus on, have brought up in conferences and in online
journalism "talk fests" and so on. It's so complicated, no one seems
to want to attempt to find a way to pool us together. Or they suggest
different writers freelance groups that you can pay to join and then
MAYBE can get insurance. But probably not.

I think health insurance needs a lot of reform, from how we regulate
drug companies to tort reform. I also think that workers should be
able to buy insurance through their state government -- join the pool
of state workers somehow.

I also think that if I can't get health insurance for my family, then
no elected official in this entire country should be able to get it.
Why do our elected leaders have benefits that we can't get?

If nothing else, we need to start screaming loud about this. As
someone with a pre-existing condition married to a cancer survivor, we
make life choices based on hanging on to a policy through a job...It's
killing the entrepreneurial spirit of our country.

> >> --- On Sat, 4/11/09, Maurreen Skowran <maurreenskow...@yahoo.com> wrote:

[Kara Andrade]

FREELANCERS UNITE!

By choice or circumstance, more and more Bay Area journalists and writers
are going into business for themselves.

But leaving your media organization doesn’t have to mean losing the
protections and benefits of your union.

A new unit of the California Media Workers Guild
<http://www.mediaworkers.org/> is forming to support independent writers,
editors and journalists of every type. From credentials to benefits, working
together can help us create better working conditions and a more vibrant
marketplace.

If you're in the SF Bay Area please join our next meeting:
Noon, Friday April 24
Third-floor conference room
California Media Workers
433 Natoma Street, San Francisco.

To RSVP, or to be added to our mailing list, e-mail Sara Steffens:
moder...@gmail.com

******We also need YOUR help because we are currently researching the best
practices for securing health plans for groups such as ourselves. If you
have any information about how to qualify for group insurance please e-mail
kara.a...@gmail.com **********

[Maurreen Skowran]

Here's a link to a relevant article from NYT, although it's from May
2008:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/business/smallbusiness/27sbiz.html

It includes info for freelancers and the self-employed.