LA Times Culture Monster blog: Arts organizations stumble into the healthcare debate [View All]

[Heidi]

August 13, 2009 | 3:00 pm

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Today, a coalition of 21 national arts organizations entered the healthcare reform debate with three really good prescriptions -- and one really bad one. In additional to its helpful ideas, the coalition also wants "a healthcare reform bill that will support arts in healthcare programs, which have shown to be effective methods of prevention and patient care."

Uh, not always.

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Under the umbrella of Americans for the Arts, the Washington, D.C.-based arts lobbying group, the coalition smartly asked Congress to pass a reform bill that acknowledges the unique difficulties artists confront in obtaining healthcare.

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They call on Congress to pass a bill that will:

1) create a public health insurance option for individual artists, especially the uninsured, and create better choices for affordable access to universal health coverage without being denied because of pre-existing conditions.
2) help financially-strapped nonprofit arts organizations reduce the skyrocketing health insurance costs to cover their employees without cuts to existing benefits and staff while the economy recovers. These new cost-savings could also enable nonprofit arts organizations to produce and present more programs to serve their communities.
3) enable smaller nonprofit and unincorporated arts groups to afford to cover part- and full-time employees for the first time.
These proposals ably demonstrate a pressing need within a large sector of the public. (Americans for the Arts has estimated that nearly 6 million Americans are employed in the nonprofit sector.) They also demonstrate a pressing need within a creative class that is regularly punished for nonconformity. And they show the fiscal multiplier effect -- what we lose elsewhere because of sky-high medical expenses -- in our current system, which costs twice as much as the average for industrialized nations while ranking Americans at No. 42 in life expectancy.

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