You CAN Get Health Insurance!

[Writers Plot]

posted by Doranna Durgin

So crowed a recent article in Kiplinger's, the magazine for the organization that leads "the way in personal finance and business forecasting."
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say most of the Kiplinger's readers are decently employed. (They are, after all, seeking investment advice.) And I'm gonna take another wild guess and suppose that they mostly have health insurance with that employment.

At least, I hope so. Because if not, and they pay any attention to this article at all, they're in deep doo-doo. And you, out there--if you're writing and looking to make it a career and you take this article at face value, then you'll be in deep doo-doo, too.

The article came my way from a family member who read it in her own disbelief, and--knowing the extensive research I've done regarding the matter (thanks to being self-employed in an unkind insurance state, and then further for an article I wrote for other self-employed writers)--sent it along to see if I had the same reaction.

I guess you could say I did. I guess you could say I went one step further, with a growing head of mad as I read, until little toots of steam were coming out of my ears. Wow. What an agenda piece. "Here, look, it's not as hard as everyone says to get health insurance. All those folks making a fuss are really big fat whiners. Rest easy in your happyhappy joyjoy, decently employed persons of group health insurance status."

Okay, I may have paraphrased that a little. But what I'm not paraphrasing are quotes like this: "Forget the horror stories. Policies are available even if you're sick or retire early." "Health coverage was never meant to pay dollar one. It was meant to offer protection in a catastrophe." "Work with a broker, who will be able to add a letter explaining how you manage your condition."

The insidious thing about these quotes is that they're absolutely true. The problem with them? They're not the complete truth.

I mean, of course you can get individual health policies regardless of your health. They'll exclude every possible treatment for any existing condition (and will find ways to tie future problems to those existing conditions so they can exclude those, too), and aren't likely to cover prescriptions, preventative care, or...well, you get the picture. They're for catastrophic events, and because they're individual policies, they won't preserve the HIPAA rights that anyone with a group policy (such as that you can get through an employer) can acquire.

But that's all okay, right? Because "health coverage was never meant to cover dollar one."

Oh, please. That might have been fine and dandy before the entire health establishment evolved to become so inextricably entwined with the health insurance industry that they're now part and parcel. Now, if you don't have health insurance, your costs are far more than the special negotiated costs those with insurance pay, even if high deductibles mean you bear the entire burden. (In the screwy world of medical finances, if you can't afford health insurance, you're obviously more able to pay higher costs for the same medical services.) And even the costs paid by those with insurance, prior to the deductible, are pretty outrageous. No, health coverage was never meant to cover dollar one. That's why there are deductibles, and for some of us they're quite high. But managing those same services or procedures without coverage is an entirely different matter, even so.

But that's all okay, right? Because you can put yourself in the hands of a broker, who will make Everything Work Out.

Guess what. When I moved from New York, where I happily had a group insurance policy through my local chamber of commerce, I called the brokers in Arizona. They didn't quite laugh at me, but they came pretty close. "You," they said, "are not insurable in this state." Not just one broker, but all of them. Okay, I didn't call every broker in the state; I learn faster than that. But it was nonetheless unanimous.

So as I read this article (with the steam tooting), in which every important self-protective detail was glossed over (like how to preserve HIPAA and what that gives you) and in which HIPAA-damaging decisions were encouraged with cavalier ease, I puzzled for a long time on why anyone would write an article like this and why anyone would publish an article like this--incomplete, misleading...potentially damaging, to anyone who truly tried to use it.

And that's when I realized...maybe it wasn't written to be used. Maybe it was written to appease, and to justify a certain ongoing lack of concern and action when it comes to our floundering health industry and all the less well-to-do people floundering around within it. I can only hope that's the case, actually. Because if any of Kiplinger's readers do use this article as any kind of primer or guideline for their foray into the health insurance hunt, they're going to learn the whole truth, and they're going to learn it the hard way.

In the meantime, if you're a writer and you're newly published and you're all excited about the prospect of going full-time at the keyboard...well, there's more than one reason not to quit your day job. Kiplinger's might have you believe otherwise with this article, but in this case, they're quite full of crap. (Yes, so sayeth I.) If you've got insurance with the day job, then...embrace the day job. And meanwhile, spread the word. Because the more people who believe the same things that article says, the slower we'll be to see any move toward solution.