All of us small businesspeople can attest to the lousy state of health insurance in this country. If you need it, you can’t get it and if you can get it (when you don’t need it, of course) it costs more than your car. Hopefully, our politicians will get their heads extracted from their nether-regions and make it possible for us to all get insurance without sacrificing, oh, food and shelter, but in the meantime, it’s a tough nut to crack.
What amazes me most about navigating health insurance is the lousy state of coverage for mental health. This makes no sense to me–if one has issues of depression, for example, that can manifest as all sorts of physical complaints that will send the patient to the regular doctor, and maybe specialists over and over, costing the insurance companies much more than regular therapy and maybe meds.
And then of course there is dental coverage. I asked my dentist’s receptionist at my last cleaning how much I would have to pay if I didn’t have dental insurance: $163…for a cleaning. Now I’m not saying the guy isn’t worth it (I loathe going to the dentist but our guy is great), but huggabugga, that’s not peanuts.
And then this made me think about the penny-pinching nature of so many photographers and my own naturally “tight” financial tendencies. Here I am kvetching about the cost of a cleaning with a guy who is a DDS (they don’t use hygienists for cleanings but rather the “junior” DDS of the practice) when I know I am getting excellent care and, frankly, I charge more than that per hour. I’m getting good value for the cost even if I were paying the full rate.
Same thing for mental health care and for medical care. We all need all of these options. These need to be priorities even when we don’t have kids. We each need to go regularly to the doc to get our cholesterol checked and the physical once-over. Women need to get pap smears and mammograms. Men need to turn their heads and cough.
We can’t look at these items as luxuries. If we get sick, who will run our companies and do our creative work? Yes, getting insurance is not cheap and is a pain in the ass, but the sooner you get coverage, the better off you will be in the long run. And that is very good for business.
Wasn’t PPA part of a group of trade associations that were lobbying Congress to allow them (the trade assoc.) to act as umbrella organizations so that their members could get group rates? Does anyone know what happened to that?
Hmmm – let’s see. A teeth cleaning is about equal to a portrait sitting in scope, wouldn’t you say?. If I charged $163 for a portrait sitting I’d lose money every time. Last I checked my overhead is lower than my dentist’s.
Too bad my clients can’t claim my fees on their insurance.
Not long ago I heard the cost of equipment for an average commercial shooter was similar to setting up a dental practise.
The January 2008 issue of Consumer Reports has an article on the individual insurance market. As Leslie’s post suggests, the picture’s not a pretty one. Details at:
http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/core_health_care/005365.html