In 1988 the economy was much like todays. Maybe not quite this bad but there were people losing jobs and losing their homes. I didn’t have a home yet but I had a damned good union job at General Electric since 1984. At the age of 22 I was making about $1000 a week and I had full benefits. I had health and dental, as well as a great savings and security plan where you could have seven percent of your pay taken out and matched by the company. You could invest that amount into bonds or company stock. At the time I was considered pretty successful among my peers. I felt secure with my job because I was a union worker and even though I had little experience with unions, I knew that the company couldn’t just get rid of you unless you really screwed up. Well… I thought they couldn’t. In 1988 after negotiations with the union didn’t go so well for the company they decided to reduce the workforce from 13,000 employees to about 3000. They correctly assumed that they could outsource the work to Mexico for much cheaper rates. In addition they didn’t have to pay for employee benefits packages and if any of the Mexican workmanship was sub-standard… they didn’t pay for it at all. Unfortunately for me with only four years service in the company, I wasn’t one of the three thousand retained employees.
I was young and naive at the time and I thought the layoff would only be temporary. I was wrong. I collected the maximum unemployment benefits for six months holding out a hope for re-hire which never came. The company offered me cobra insurance which means I could keep the same insurance policy as long as I didn’t mind paying the $700 bucks a month for full family Blue Cross Blue Shield coverage with dental included. That was a joke. General Electric employees were known to be spoiled and when ten thousand of us were out of work in the same general area near Boston, good paying machinist jobs were not easy to come by. Hence the beginning of my life of self - employment and my life without adequate health insurance.
Fortunately for me over the past twenty years I have had excellent health. I have been offered many different policies from many different companies over the years. Most of which were pretty much worthless. They all had low payments with little to no actual coverage. As a self-employed contractor I have had many accidents. When I owned a landscaping company, I cut my knee with a hedge trimmer once and on a second occasion I almost lopped off my finger. As a seamless gutter contractor I have fallen off ladders five times. Another time I was playing basketball with my son and dislocated my finger. This last injury was the most expensive at $1000. I have had hundreds of minor cuts and have been occasionally sick with the flu etc. In all of these cases I had to pay for my care out of my pocket. And I didn’t even include doctors or dentists visits. The availability of decent, affordable healthcare for the self-employed wasn’t really a reality for me or most other contractors for that matter.
Ironically I just purchased a decent family plan from the Mega Life and Health Insurance Co. http://www.megainsurance.com/. I say ironically because since becoming self-employed in 1989 last year was by far the worst year ever because of the flailing economy. This is the first time I’ve had a really decent family plan since I worked at General Electric over twenty years ago, It still isn’t as good as the coverage I had but it will cover me for most catastrophic accidents or illnesses. Hopefully I’ll never have to use it but I felt at age forty three that I was pushing my luck and that it would just be a matter of time until I had some medical issues. I read a book recently by Jim Cramer that is titled “Stay Mad For Life.” http://books.google.com/books?id=l6-GkHUu5qwC This book outlines the importance of health insurance as one of the major steps to becoming wealthy by preserving your assets from deterioration due to a catastrophic illness such as a heart attack or cancer. If you are self-employed I recommend this book and finding a way to include some degree of affordable health insurance into your monthly budget.
