"In our culture, we have in our mind that everything comes from the plants," he says. "We have all kinds of plants for problems with the stomach, with diabetes. You don't see these plants in the markets. All of the plants are something for health."
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GEOFF CUNNINGHAM AND NICOLE SMITH
GEOFF CUNNINGHAM'S sporadic health insurance history is so very Hollywood. When he's hot, he's hot. And when he's not, he's uninsured.
"It just depends on your income, and in entertainment, it fluctuates," says the 36-year-old filmmaker. "When you don't have much coming in and you're thinking about what might get cut, you start thinking, 'Well, I'm relatively young and healthy.' There have been times in my life when I've chanced it. My parents freak out."
Chancing it means going uncovered, betting that unexpected disease or injury will not hit. For most of his adult life, his insurance status has depended on the work he's doing and for whom. He's had permanent jobs and with them he's been covered by a variety of plans, including HMOs and PPOs. He's run his own business during which, at times, he and his wife, actress Nicole Smith, have taken the risk of going without health insurance. At one point, Smith had to go to the emergency room for heart palpitations that turned out to be nothing more than a scare.
"They ran a few tests, and the bill was a couple of thousand dollars," says Cunningham. The West Hollywood couple paid out of pocket.
Coverage for a lot of Americans is spotty. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that nearly 46 million Americans didn't have health insurance in 2004, but like Cunningham, many of them go in and out of the market. Some 73% of those uninsured have gone without coverage for at least a year, while 27% have been uninsured for less than a year.
Now, Cunningham and Smith have decided to buy a health insurance plan that costs $1,250 a year for both of them, but covers nothing until a $10,000 deductible has been met. The corker, he says, is how difficult it is to know what you're buying in the individual health insurance market. "What I hate about this is you can't shop for it, you can't compare what you'll actually be getting. There's no transparency," he says. Still, he knows he's lucky. If the worst happened and he and his wife had to come up with $10,000 for medical bills before coverage kicked in, they could manage it. "A lot of people couldn't take that hit," he says.
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MAMIE JACKSON
