Thursday (8/13) on the Los Angeles Times blog Culture Monster, Christopher Knight writes, “Today, a coalition of 21 national arts organizations entered the healthcare reform debate with three really good prescriptions … They call on Congress to pass a bill that will: 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; 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; 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.”
Posted August 14, 2009
