Dr. David Hinkamp works at the University of Illinois at Chicago, codirecting the Health in the Arts Program—a medical clinic that was founded to research and treat problems specific to artists and then started offering artists basic care, too, because so many needed it. But he’s long looked with envy on a similar entity, New York’s Al Hirschfeld clinic for uninsured and underinsured people in the entertainment industry, run by the Actors Fund. One big difference between Health in the Arts and Hirschfeld is that uninsured artists in Chicago are charged for care—they go through a financial evaluation and pay according to their means. The New York artists get Hirschfeld’s services for free.
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“This is a big deal,” Brown told the modest crowd, echoing (but strategically abridging) Joe Biden’s more colloquial comment to President Obama when the Affordable Care Act was signed in March. Most of the people now served by Hirschfeld, he told me later, won’t need its services anymore. And the all-too-familiar benefit event for an ailing artist who’s racking up astronomical medical bills should be history, too. (There’s one for Chicago fringe-theater icon Beau O’Reilly—whose insurance, he says, doesn’t cover necessities like anesthesia and physical therapy associated with his recent knee replacement surgery—Sunday, November 14, 3 PM, at the School of the Art Institute.)
But barring the success of the current campaigns to challenge or repeal it, the Affordable Care Act will extend health insurance to about 30 million people who don’t have it now, and, Brown says, help a lot of artists, many of whom are self-employed or work for small firms that’ll be getting new tax credits for offering their employees health insurance.
There are no more lifetime dollar limits on the amount of your benefits—again, effective immediately on new contracts and at annual renewal for existing contracts. Annual limits, however, won’t be dropped until 2014, and insurers are battling to save them.
Cosponsored by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Career Transition for Dancers, last week’s panel, “Creatives at Work Forum: Health and Social Services for Performing Artists,” included doctors (two dancers and a violinist) from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, which offers the Medical Program for Performing Artists, in which patients are treated by a team and matched with physicians who understand their art form. The services of these “physiatrists” don’t come free, but those of two other panel members do: Maryellen Langhout of Career Transition for Dancers provides counseling on nonperformance work to midwestern dancers 16 and up, and Don Towne, a clinical social worker handling the central region for the Actor’s Fund, provides social services to entertainment pros, including emergency financial assistance and short-term counseling.
