At Alas, Angry Black Woman describes a predicament that strikes many creative people sooner or later:
For most of my adult life, I’ve had to live without health insurance. Because I was a freelancer for many years, or because I did not have a fixed residence for a while, or because my skills and career interests often meant that the best jobs available to me were with small companies or non-profit organizations that did not offer benefits. I spent something like 6 years without health insurance.
I’m only going to address the first part of ABW’s resume: being a freelancer for many years. What’s more entrepreneurial than working for yourself, building a client base, managing your own business? Shouldn’t the Republicans rabidly favor any change that would promote that American entrepreneurial spirit?
Seriously, there are ways to deal with freelancers other than just casting them out into the cold and hoping they don’t come back in with frostbite. When I lived in Germany, I eventually aged out of eligibility for student health insurance, though I was still dissertating. By then I was also translating as a pretty major sideline (hence the slow dissertating). I worked with an agency or two, but I was still a freelancer. Through other expats, I heard about the Künstlersozialkasse. While this sounds like a serious disease to American ears, it was actually a pretty clever invention. The KSK was a special public health insurance agency that catered to freelance writers, artists, musicians, and other creative folks who might have otherwise been left uninsured.
I submitted a sample of my work translating ludicrous “lifestyle” articles from Porsche’s customer magazine (not the technical articles, which weren’t artsy enough) and I was good to go.
Germany’s economy is often criticized as being insufficiently nimble – as stifling entrepreneurship, thanks to higher taxes and more regulations than we have in America. But here’s one area where the U.S. systematically smothers creativity and innovation. And while I’d prefer to see a single-payer system where you didn’t have to prove that your translations were artsy enough, any public option that was affordable to entrepreneurs, small-business owners, and freelancers would still be pretty grand.
Republicans and Blue Dog Democracts, you’ve got a choice. You can support innovation. Or you can keep serving your masters in the insurance industry. You can’t do both.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Sungold, good point. People of means need to decide whether their free market values really mean a level playing field for all, or whether they just mean they want to be left alone to remain rich in peace.
“Republicans and Blue Dog Democracts, you’ve got a choice. You can support innovation.
Or you can keep serving your masters in the insurance industry. You can’t do both.”
And another value choice: Is the health of one’s fellow citizens ultimately more or less important than personal profit? A profitable insurance industry is never going to result in affordable health care. Modern high tech medicine is hugely expensive on its own, without yet another unproductive layer super-imposed on it, sucking money out of the system. Has anyone done the sums on whether the extent to which the USA spends more on health care than other nations may be roughly equivalent to the money made by the insurance industry?
Hi Reg – With this post, I wasn’t intending to foreground values, in particular. My own value system is perfectly clear: Health care ought to be a universal right, and those countries that can afford care have no excuse for abridging this right.
What I wanted to point out here is that the status quo is unsatisfactory even within the “pro-business” frame of these legislators. If Repubs and Blue Dog Dems are serious about supporting innovation and entrepreneurship, they need to reform health care so that people who strike out on their own aren’t penalized.
I can’t answer your last question, but I suspect the answer to it would be highly illuminating.
Sungold, sorry, I should have made it clear that I thought your post spoke for itself, and prompted me to ask those other questions typically off topically.
It occurs to me though that, in their very nature, politicians seek to externalise values from the personal realm to the wider community. The situation you describe embodies the kind of double standards which have certainly brought politics and politicians into a dangerous degree of contempt here in the UK, where greed and expediency is perceived to have triumphed thoroughly over conviction. hence I’m somewhat obsessed with values.
I’m glad you brought the question of values back into it, because our laws *do* express our values. Unfortunately too many politicians find that their values are for sale to the highest bidder. The system of lobbying is really corrupt.
Last night, my husband was looking at the online study guide for the exam to become a citizen of the U.S. (He’s exploring the possibility of dual citizenship.) One of them asked what form of government the U.S. has. I said, “Do you suppose you’d get credit if you answer ‘kleptocracy’?”