Hot Type, for the week of January 4, 2002 -- continued Unsure and Uninsured Beth Lisberg is a Chicago-based freelance technical writer who's never been active in the National Writers Union but asked one thing in return for her $240 annual dues: access to affordable health insurance. The NWU's 7,000 self-employed, largely middle-aged journalists scattered across the country aren't any insurer's idea of a lucrative business opportunity, and over the years the NWU has bounced from one group plan to another, cobbling together different plans for different states. The 450 members of the Chicago local were given a choice: they could stay with Aetna, whose single-person rate, Lisberg tells me, was being jacked from $275 a month to $408. Or they could switch to Nevada-based Employers Mutual and pay $326. For Lisberg it was an easy choice, and she was happy with it until she tried to fill a prescription in October and Walgreens wouldn't accept her $20 co-pay. Curious, she went on-line, and discovered that Employers Mutual wasn't licensed in Illinois, and in Texas had been ordered by the state insurance commissioner to stop selling policies or collecting premiums because it wasn't paying claims. In fact, Employers Mutual had collapsed. On December 13 a federal judge in Reno fired the company's management and appointed a receiver, who will now see what can be done about settling claims against Employers Mutual by the 29,000 people -- a few hundred of them NWU members in Illinois and some other states -- who thought they were insured by it. Lisberg sent a steaming letter to NWU president Jonathan Tasini in New York. She raised what she called the "serious implications" of Employers Mutual's collapse, these being "negligence" by the NWU for not checking out Employers Mutual closely enough before endorsing its policy and "fraud" for offering nonexistent benefits. She wondered why NWU members couldn't receive coverage from the United Auto Workers -- which the NWU joined as UAW Local 1981 a few years ago to bring more muscle to the bargaining table. "If we are a union, and the UAW is a union, and we are affiliated with the UAW, then we should have the same rights and benefits," Lisberg reasoned. "Else we are not truly a union." Tasini's assistant, Chris Zic, E-mailed Lisberg that by some familiar yardsticks the NWU isn't exactly a union. "The NWU's membership is rather different from the traditional labor union mode, certainly from the general constituency of the UAW," he wrote. "As our members engage in all sorts of different professional practices under the rubric of `writing' and moreover are dispersed throughout the country and are not contained in a given factory or workplace, the kinds of health insurance that the UAW provides for its members does not apply to us." Lisberg wasn't the only angry and worried NWU member Tasini heard from. On December 18 he E-mailed a dire "update" to Employers Mutual policy holders: "All efforts with state insurance regulators to obtain reinsurance, and get Employers Mutual licensed and, above all else, to get all claims paid, have failed." He reported that the insurance broker that brought Employers Mutual to the NWU was looking for new coverage. But, he said, "In spite of these efforts it is uncertain when new health insurance coverage will be available. It may never become available. We therefore recommend that you seek other health insurance coverage." Fortunately, Lisberg and other NWU members in her shoes were given the option of switching to the more expensive Aetna plan. That's what Lisberg did. On December 21, Mark Uehling, a science and medicine reporter who sits on the steering committee of the Chicago NWU, E-mailed the 100-some NWU members who'd been enrolled in the Employers Mutual plan. There was pretty good news: the court-appointed receiver in Nevada was "squeaky-clean," and according to Tasini, some Employers Mutual claims were being paid. There was troubling news: lawyers were vetting all of Tasini's statements, "making them less intelligible than they might be if he had written them himself," and the receiver was settling claims from Employers Mutual's frozen assets and how long they'd last was a mystery. And there was simply gloomy news: "We are waiting for clarification. We will also continue to collect your reports, which are highly distressing. (One Chicago member has $26,000 in medical bills dating to July of this year.) In attempting to sort out this crisis, the Chicago local is frustratingly helpless: we did not offer the insurance and have had no contact with the UAW attorneys who are drafting the union's strategy." This week Uehling called it a "terrible situation," yet he sounded marginally more hopeful. "I think people are starting to sort things out," he told me. "They're starting to feel they really do have insurance." How much and for how long he couldn't say. "Some money is flowing. We don't know what sort of money is flowing." Legal action? "Some of the people are whispering this," Uehling allowed. "It breaks my heart to hear it, but you have to understand that people take a union's promise to provide insurance very seriously." News Bite • Special edition...Promoting the last installment of Chris Fusco's exceptional series on a friend's liver transplant, the Saturday, December 29, Sun-Times carried a picture of the Sunday, December 30, front page. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2002 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.