Criticism
The cost of selling individual insurance requires more overhead than group insurance. "Policies that provide the exact same coverage to someone working for a large employer will cost more for an individual," says the Center for American Progress's website for college students. "Even worse, insurers can pick and choose preexisting conditions and then deny coverage for those deemed too costly to cover." A Center for American Progress fellow estimated the average difference in administrative costs alone was $300 per year between individual and group insurance. The Freelancers Union acknowledges those problems with the open market, but asserts that its large-group bargaining power, its captive insurance company's obligation to grant coverage, and its non-profit marketing role all serve as effective remedies.
In January 2008, Freelancers Union was criticized by both its members and the press when its new Freelancers Insurance Company became the entity providing coverage to members. At that time, the Union dropped Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield in favor of a range of new options, mostly more expensive, with Anthem BC/BS remaining only as claims processing agent. Members then faced the complexity inherent in comparing the limits, exclusions, co-payments, co-insurance percentages, and annual and other deductibles of the various new options with those of the old plans. Through this process, some members were even inadvertently dropped altogether.
Read more about this topic: Freelancers Union
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)