You Try to Make Sense of Health Insurance

So you graduate from school with a degree in pretend and move to LA. Awesome! Now you need a part-time job which will allow you keep your days open so you can go to auditions. You interview at a restaurant, are hired and look over your manual. They only give insurance to those who have worked over a year at a consistent 30 hours a week. You are consistently scheduled for 20 hours a week. You scrape by.

You are non-union. Then you become Aftra. Awesome, good job! But you don't work enough Aftra hours to become eligible for their insurance.

You get sick.

You don't go to the hospital because that's expensive. You don't even have a primary physician, so whatever, you know? Who cares.

You get worse.

You get strep.

Now you have to go to the hospital or the emergency care center so that you can get checked out and tested for what you already know you have because you had it just a few months ago; you can barely move, only want to sleep, and it hurts to talk, swallow and even breathe. Your ears hurt too.

You pay the $80 to see the doctor and get the prescription for what seems like a simple antibiotic. But it aint simple. It's $60.

So what are you? You're an uninsured, starving artist who can't get enough work to qualify for insurance, and aren't making enough to buy it on your own. Then you get sick, miss work, and now have a gaping hole in your wallet.

Oh, and your fiance is also a freelance artist, meaning there's no insurance plan for you to marry into either.

And that is why you are excited about the new federal health care plan, even though you don't really know what it is, except that you will most likely be able to afford some sort of plan, or even, (Awesomesauce!) check ups and vaccines might be Free!

So you find a video that clears up a lot of questions and pass it along to all your starving artist friends.  Cause you're cool like that.