Safety Nets for Freelancers - NYTimes.com

New York Times blogger David Bornstein wrote a follow-up to a piece reporting on the Freelancers Union's health plans for freelancers, including some of the reactions of readers, some of whom were grateful for the plans supplied by the Freelancers Union, but others of whom thought they were too expensive. And they're not cheap; according to Bornstein, they start at $225 a month. However, as Bornstein writes:

F.I.C.’s plans are substantially less expensive than most other options available to independent workers in New York, but they are not cheap. Individual plans range from $225 to $603 per month. (That’s the main reason that, like many others, I went without health insurance for the first decade of my writing career.) For 2012, many health insurance companies requested permission to enact huge premium increases. For example, Aetna made a request to hike the rates for its individual and small-group plans from 8.9 to 53.6 percent. Freelancers Union’s rates also went up, but only by 2.3 to 8.3 percent, well below the average. (In 2010, Aetna’s chief executive, Ronald A. Williams, also received $72 million in compensation.)

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

When/if the United States ever has the courage to get its act together and offer basic health care to its citizens -- whether they're employed by a company, self-employed or unemployed -- then plans such as those offered by the Freelancers Union will be unnecessarily. Until then, freelancers will still have to choose between paying a large proportion of their incomes for health insurance or taking the chance of having none at all.

Posted via email from Resources for Freelance Writers