Ugh. Ibe zick.
I mean, I’m sick. I don’t do sick. Thankfully I rarely get really sick, beyond the occasional cold. This time I was out for the count, knocked down in Round 2, the fight was over before it began. I spent all day Saturday in bed. I’ll keep the gory details to myself (you’re welcome), but it wasn’t pretty. It’s some kind of flu, I don’t know, swine, chicken, puppy, muppet, or maybe human.
I tried a dose of Twitter but it wasn’t effective, aside from sympathy-wise (thanks @fabeku!). Two of our kids are also sick and they’re not allowed on Twitter so I had a control group. It doesn’t work.
I’ll never know what we all had (have) because we didn’t go to a doctor. Even if we had health insurance, we wouldn’t have gone to a doctor. We tend to try healing ourselves with natural remedies before getting doctors involved, so our monthly premium would be wasted anyway.
Is that scary? It is to a lot of people, especially freelancers. Being really, horribly sick this time made me start thinking about how I’ve never really said anything about it here. I write a lot about freelancing and independent business, but I’ve never touched on the topic of health care.
Our family’s views on health care and our system for healing ourselves is personal and very unconventional, to say the least. We’re not “doctor” people and we recognize that as a blessing and a luxury because none of has any chronic condition that need regular maintenance.
So we’re fortunate. Oddly enough, we were supposed to do this walk for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation today. We have some friends with a daughter who has the disease and we joined their team to raise money to find a cure. Thankfully, the money we raised wasn’t dependent on whether or not we walked, so they will still benefit.
So I can only imagine what it must be like to need insurance to cover costs of caring for a child with diabetes.
As an independent business dude, I have health insurance options. There are national organizations like the AIGA where I have plans to choose from. So far we’ve chosen not to have insurance at all. We tried a plan last year, but since we never went to the doctor we never came close to meeting our insanely high deductible. Even if we had an emergency it wouldn’t have been covered, it would have been all out of pocket. There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but when we thought about paying $3600/year for a bottom-of-the-barrel plan that didn’t even cover prescriptions, we thought that was kind of… stupid.
We think a lot about insurance here. About how the system we’ve got here in the U.S. is just a mess. No matter what side of the political argument you stand on, you have to admit it’s a big hot mess. Some dramatic changes need to happen.
So I’m curious about other independent creatives. What you do to meet your health care needs? What are your big concerns? What do you think is the best solution to the high cost of health care? What’s a pretty good solution? What’s the weirdest solution you can think of that will never happen but might get us thinking?
I’m happy that on sites like Biznik, they’ve put out a call to start talking about the issue in the public forums there. This is important. We’re not all going to agree on the best practice (In fact, I’m expecting to get a lot of flack for not having insurance), we all have our personal faiths and political views, but if we can be active in talking about possible solutions we’ll at least have a say in what health care will look like instead of passively hoping it will all turn out okay.
So let’s talk about it. I would love it if you would share your thoughts here, but if you regularly visit creative-type forums or blogs, make your thoughts known there. Just be respectful of others’ views, even if they don’t mesh with your own. The ultimate solution is going to be some combination of all ideologies.