Tam Harbert

Republicans and Corporate America frequently argue that reducing corporate taxes will lead to investment in the United States and the creation of more U.S. jobs. They say that if corporations could retain more of their earnings, they would spend it in ways that benefit the U.S. economy. First, that ignores the fact that American companies are sitting on mountains of cash. (The Federal Reserve reported that non-financial companies held more than $2 trillion in cash at the end of June, the highest level of cash as a percent of corporate assets since 1963, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

Secondly, it plays into the fallacy that today’s corporate entities are loyal to any nation-state. Although companies love to drape themselves in the U.S. flag whenever they lobby the government, there is no Corporate America. There are just huge multinational corporations with operations and sales all over the world, whose only goal is to make money. They will invest wherever they get the best deal, period. And that’s usually not in the United States.

So, when Congress gives them these special deals, we need to pay more attention to what happens afterward. A recent study by a congressional subcommittee does this. The only reason this wonky report, covering an arcane tax provision from 2004, caught my eye was because the technology industry had lobbied hard for it back in 2004, when I was covering public policy for Electronic Business magazine. Following my inner wonk, I downloaded and read “Repatriating Offshore Funds: 2004 Tax Windfall for Select Multinationals,” by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (You can download the report from this page on Senator Carl Levin’s website.)

By passing the American Jobs Act of 2004, Congress dropped the top corporate tax rate from 35 to 32 percent, which was largely symbolic because U.S. companies find ways to manipulate tax laws to significantly reduce their taxes. In fact, a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office found that 55 percent of U.S. companies paid no federal income taxes during a least one year out of a seven-year period studied.

More significantly, the 2004 legislation created a tax holiday, cutting for one year the tax rate on foreign earnings brought back to the United States, from 35 percent to just 5.25 percent. U.S. companies are taxed twice – at least theoretically – on profits earned abroad: once by the country in which they are earned and then again by America when those earnings are brought back to the States. Companies had argued that this double-taxation kept them from bringing such revenues back home and investing in the United States.

In early October, the Senate subcommittee published its report on what happened. Rather than creating U.S. jobs or increasing R&D spending, “the 2004 repatriation tax provision was followed by an increase in dollars spent on stock repurchases and executive compensation,” says the report. This, despite the fact that the law specifically prohibited the use of those funds for either of those expenditures. The tax break “provided a windfall for multinationals in a few industries without benefiting the U.S. economy as a whole.”

Of course, there’s no way to prove that the exact funds that these corporations repatriated were used to buy back stock or give CEOs huge raises. “Because money is fungible and corporations were not required to track expenditures of repatriated funds, it was impossible to determine if the surveyed corporations used their repatriated funds to increase planned expenditures for worker training and hiring in the United States or for R&D, or instead used the repatriated funds for expenses that had already been planned and would have been made in any event, and then used freed up funds to pay for prohibited purposes such as increased stock repurchases or executive compensation,” the report explains.

In my coverage back in 2004, I noted that the law required companies to draw up a “domestic reinvestment plan,” approved by the senior management and the board of directors, for how to spend the money. That plan could include worker hiring and training, infrastructure improvements, R&D, capital investments or “the financial stabilization of the corporation for purposes of job retention or creation.” I put that in because it sure sounded like a loophole. Indeed, I quoted a tax expert saying, “anyone in their right mind is going to make that plan as broad as possible” to cover all potential uses for the money.

The report shows that the repatriated profits most definitely did not go to investing in the United States. A total of 843 corporations repatriated $312 billion as a result of the tax break. The top 15 companies in terms of repatriated funds, which accounted for 52 percent of the total amount repatriated, included IBM, HP, Intel, Motorola, Microsoft and Oracle. Of those 15 companies, 66 percent recorded job losses from 2004 to 2007. Eighty percent increased their stock repurchases, by an average of 16 percent from 2004 to ‘05 and by an average of 38 percent from ‘05 to ‘06. Executive compensation at the 15 firms, which had increased 14 percent the year before the tax break, increased 27 percent in 2004-05 and another 30 percent in 2005-06.

Recently, the Republicans and big corporations have started another campaign to get taxes reduced or dropped on foreign earnings, using the same arguments as in 2004. I can only pray that our government and the American people look at the facts and the corporate track record this time around.

Something’s rotten in the technology industry, and the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission is trying to root it out.

In December, the SEC brought fraud charges against mid-level executives at Flextronics International Ltd., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Dell. These men had been “consulting” part-time over the last two to three years for expert network firm Primary Global Research LLC. The four were allegedly paid more than $400,000 to participate in calls with Wall Street hedge firms and traders — calls that it turns out the Federal Bureau of Investigation had wire-tapped.

The SEC complaint charges that these managers shared material non-public information about their companies, and it includes quotes from transcripts of the taped calls to illustrate. In an October 2009 call, for example, a Flextronics senior director of business development tells a trader that Apple is coming out in the spring with a new iPhone (presumably the iPhone 4) that will include two cameras, a five megapixel auto-focus camera, and a VGA forward-facing video conferencing camera. He also reveals that Flextronics expects to start building the new phone in March. (The iPhone 4 started shipping in June.)

A Dec. 20 Wall Street Journal article says that this is just “the first major shoe to drop” in a three-year investigation. The investigators seem to be following a trail that began with the insider trading charges filed against the Galleon Group and its founder Raj Rajaratnam in late 2009. Former AMD Chairman Hector Ruiz has been tied to the Galleon investigation, although he has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Former high-level IBM executive Robert W. Moffat Jr., however, pleaded guilty to leaking inside information about IBM, Lenovo and Advanced Micro Devices in the Galleon case. Last fall he was sentenced to six months in jail. In the charges filed last month against the tech executives, the SEC describes a secret witness, “an individual who had substantial experience evaluating public companies in the semiconductor and technology industries.” The WSJ story identified that witness as Karl Motey, a technology analyst who had a business connection with a hedge-fund manager charged in the Galleon case.

One of the WSJ’s sources said that Motey made calls, presumably as a client of Primary Global, to corporate managers at more than 60 companies, gathering evidence for the government. It won’t surprise me if all 60 of those tech companies are eventually implicated. The growing scandal reflects the continuing cozy relationship between the tech industry and Wall Street. Over the course of my 25-year career reporting on this business, I’ve often been amazed by how chummy the two groups are. In tech, where so much of salary and compensation rides on initial public offerings and stock options, and where much of a company’s financial success depends on the technology the company is bringing to the market, these relationships may be a natural outgrowth. But, perhaps because so many tech companies grew out of the Silicon Valley’s venture capital culture – in which inside information is not criminal, but rather, the stock in trade (pun intended) of the business – there seems to be widespread nonchalance, even disregard, of SEC regulations designed to protect the interests of ordinary investors.

Every few years, it seems the SEC makes a run at reining in the abuses at tech companies. Five years ago, for example, it investigated a bunch of tech companies – including Analog Devices, Broadcom and Apple – for allegedly backdating stock options. Apparently, many companies routinely changed the date on which their boards approved stock options, moving it from the real date to an earlier date so that the options would benefit from a recent rise in the stock price. Companies are still dealing with the legal fallout from that scandal.

It will be interesting to see who else the SEC catches in this latest net. Indeed, just a few days ago, Reuters reported that court documents recently filed in the Galleon case named a former senior marketing director at Akamai Technologies Inc. as a source who allegedly provided inside information to a trader. Will all this lead to changes in tech industry practices? Unless dozens of high-profile execs get charged, convicted, and sent to jail, history indicates that the odds are against it.

(For more details on the individuals involved and the information they shared, read my blog post on EBN Online.)

Every now and then, I hear a tech executive say something so astonishingly oblivious to what’s going on in the rest of the world – the world of us average, common people – that at first I think he’s kidding. Then my jaw drops as I realize that he is completely serious. He’s certainly not stupid. In fact, most of these people are very smart. But the tech cognoscenti can get so wrapped up in their insular world of cool inventions that they don’t see obvious problems and dangerous pitfalls.

Case in point: At Forrester Research’s Content and Collaboration Forum, held last week in Washington, D.C., a Microsoft executive described how the company’s employees use their in-house podcasting platform, called Academy Mobile. The platform is like a “private YouTube network,” where employees can post video clips to share their knowledge, said Christian Finn, director of SharePoint at Microsoft. To demonstrate, he showed a webcast created by a Microsoft salesman to share tips on demonstrating and selling a particular product. There is the intrepid salesman, greeting us from behind the wheel as he drives at a speed of probably 65 mph down a busy interstate highway somewhere in North Carolina. Speaking to a webcam mounted on his car’s dashboard, he introduces the other sales reps in his car – taking his right hand off the wheel to move the webcam and show his passengers – and tells us how the three of them are going to share some of their most effective techniques.

The clip isn’t long, probably about 30 seconds. But it’s long enough to show that the driver is paying much more attention to the camera than to his driving. Already alarmed at what I saw, I was horrified when I heard Finn joke about the fact that they were webcasting while driving. He warned the audience to watch out for these guys. “If you’re driving down in North Carolina,” he chuckled, “be careful!”

Apparently neither Finn, Microsoft’s marketing team nor the traveling salesmen saw anything wrong with a) a driver conducting a webcast from a moving vehicle or b) Finn using this as an example in a public presentation of the technology. Multi-tasking while driving is so common, acceptable and probably even expected in the technology world that they either forgot about or decided to ignore the mounting evidence that distracted driving is killing people. In 2009, 5,500 people died and 450,000 were injured in America because of distracted driving, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. That represents 16 percent of the total deaths on U.S. roadways. And that’s considered a conservative estimate because many police reports don’t document whether driver distraction played a role in the crash.

They should know better. Microsoft’s own home state of Washington is one of eight states that prohibit drivers from using handheld mobile phones, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. (North Carolina is not among the eight.) Even if these laws don’t ban webcasting while driving (yet), how can these guys be so tone deaf? Just last month, the Department of Transportation held the second annual National Distracted Driving Summit in D.C. Ironically, DOT Secretary Ray LaHood talked about the joint efforts of the government and the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety to get U.S. corporations to adopt policies to discourage distracted driving among their employees. Apparently, Microsoft didn’t get the memo.

Just because drivers can use these products in their cars doesn’t mean they should. Rather than encouraging us to take our hands off the wheel, tech executives had better put their own ears to the ground. They just might hear the rumblings of an oncoming public relations crash.

When people get all their news from Facebook, Twitter and blogs, how will they know what’s factual and accurate? Will it even matter to them?

If those questions alarm you, then check out the News Literacy Project, a program that tries to teach students “the critical thinking skills to sort fact from fiction in the digital age.” Indeed, the organization’s tag line – “how to know what to believe” – sums up its mission succinctly.

The worry: that in the age of Google, Wikipedia and seemingly limitless online information young people are losing the important skill of discernment, that they view all information – regardless of source or bias – as equal in value, and that they will therefore be incapable of making well-informed decisions. Not only will journalism suffer, but such a citizenry could damage, even ultimately destroy, our democratic society.

I had never heard of the organization, even though it has a pilot program at a local school – Walt Whitman Senior High School in Bethesda, Md. I discovered it when a fellow journalist forwarded me an e-mail announcing that the project was sponsoring a panel discussion at Whitman on “The Future of Journalism in the Digital Age.” That would be my future, so of course I went to hear what they had to say.

On the panel were seasoned journalist Ray Suarez, senior correspondent of the PBS NewsHour, and the heads of two major news organizations – Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of NPR, and Katharine Weymouth, publisher of The Washington Post. Although they talked about journalism’s present and future, they didn’t say anything we in the profession haven’t heard before or experienced first-hand. Ironically, the panel served as an exercise in critical, analytical thinking for those of us in the audience. The News Literacy Project teaches kids to question what they read (or hear) and to consider the bias of the source. Both Schiller and Weymouth insisted on extolling the virtues of the digital age of journalism, while refusing to discuss the downside, such as how it has decimated the staffs at most news organizations. Suarez, the moderator, tried to raise these issues, but got nowhere. In fact, they flat-out ignored a question from an audience member about whether either of them planned to farm out research and basic reporting to workers in India, as some news organizations have already.

They kept stressing the importance of quality journalism, the value of good reporting and the crucial need for students to appreciate these values and learn how to pick the wheat from the chaff. All the while I kept thinking, “OK, but who’s going to pay for that quality?” I could barely contain a chortle when the Post’s Weymouth said she tells aspiring young journalists that the most valuable skill is “to be a good reporter.” The Post has laid off hundreds of staff in the last few years. It essentially killed its business section last year. I’m pretty sure they were all good reporters.

Nevertheless, the News Literacy Project seems a worthwhile endeavor. It may not save our jobs, but it may save our society. To learn more, take a look at this video.

As a writer, I believe strongly in the concept of copyright, retaining the rights to the work by which creative professionals earn their living. But I have a confession to make. Ever since I launched my website, I’ve been operating in a gray area when it comes to the copyright on images.

I strongly suspect, however, that I’m not alone. How many of you out there – yes, you writers and bloggers – verify the copyright and obtain permission if required for every image you use from the Web?

I thought so. Me, too.

Initially, I was concerned about using the magazine covers on my website. Still am. But the images are so small I’m betting these publishers won’t give me grief about it. At any rate, it’s probably fair use.

But I faced another copyright challenge once I figured out how to add images to my blog posts. I’ve tried to be careful, but it’s not easy – in fact it often seems impossible – to figure out whether images are copyrighted. A Google search for mountains, for example, yields more than 37 million images. If I start clicking through these, a few are obviously copyrighted – they carry the familiar copyright symbol, ©. But most do not. Of course, the law no longer requires a work to display the © symbol for copyright protection. In fact, when I click on any image, Google warns me that “This image may be subject to copyright.” When I click further to go to the original source – which may be a commercial website, someone’s blog, or even a variety of websites that claim to offer “free” images, it’s never clear whether the image is copyrighted. There is no copyright notice on the photo, although there is a copyright notice at the bottom of the website. Presumably this copyrights the website, but not the photo.

When I attended the Future of Freelancing conference last summer, one presenter mentioned that a good way to find images available for legal use was to search Creative Commons (CC). I’ve tried, but remain baffled. Right off the bat, the home page tells me:

“Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license. You should always verify that the work is actually under a CC license by following the link. Since there is no registration to use a CC license, CC has no way to determine what has and hasn’t been placed under the terms of a CC license. If you are in doubt you should contact the copyright holder directly, or try to contact the site where you found the content.”

In addition, Creative Commons offers a confusing array of different types of licenses that specify different conditions under which I may use the work. So even if I figure out it’s licensed under Creative Commons, I still have to decipher exactly how I’m allowed to use it.

All this means that locating and verifying an image often takes as long as writing the blog post. Sometimes longer. Occasionally, I actually discover the copyright owner and ask for permission. The outpouring of gratitude tells me how widescale this problem is.

Here’s what Richard Krzemien, the author of the cartoon I used in last week’s post, told me about copyright infringement: “I used to keep close track of copyright problems, but honestly it can become a full time job. That’s why I took most of my comics down from the site. And all that’s available are the low resolution versions online. I figure it’s the cost of doing business. So I greatly appreciate you contacting me for permission.”

I’m sure what I’ve run into is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of copyright infringement on the Web. Come to think of it, that would make a good illustration for this post. There are 1.5 million images of iceberg tips on Google. I wonder which ones are legal?

I’m looking forward to attending “The Future of Freelancing,” a conference this week at Stanford University. Co-sponsored by the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the conference’s goal is to “help freelancers explore their evolving careers and stay inspired.” Well, I know many freelancers that are not only uninspired these days, they are downright desperate. In fact, the conference title might be more fitting if it had a question mark at the end. Because many of my colleagues doubt journalism, much less freelance journalism, has a future.

I’m convinced it does. But it’s going to be so different from what we’re used to that we aren’t even capable of conceiving it yet. A source for one of my stories on digital publishing points out that when the automobile first came out, people called it the horseless carriage. The only way they could define these early cars was by relating them to a familiar mode of transportation. That’s the kind of disconnect we have in the publishing business. The whole world has changed, and we don’t understand the new world well enough yet to see where and how we’ll fit in. And many of us are terrified that we are selling buggy whips.

The terror has been building steadily this year. A couple of months ago, I participated in a lively LinkedIn discussion. The thread was started by a post by freelance colleague Polly Traylor, who lamented the state of the freelance business on her blog. It didn’t take long for many of us to chime in – and the opinions ranged from: it’s a brand new world and “those who learn to adapt and embrace the change may actually find a lot of opportunity in it” to “freelance journalism is dead” and all that’s left to do is “put fresh flowers on its grave.” (You can read the discussion here.)

It’s clear that no one – including the biggest media companies – has a clue. Consider these two news reports from just this week. First, News Corp. announced strategic moves toward its promised strategy of charging readers for online content. It bought Skiff LLC , which makes an e-reader and a digital publishing platform. News Corp. also invested in Journalism Online, a startup by Steven Brill and other media executives that aims to offer a way for publishers to charge readers for online news.

In contrast, Forbes.com is going in the other direction, apparently planning to use thousands of unpaid contributors instead of professional journalists, according to a report by Paul Carr on TechCrunch. At a recent staff meeting Lewis Dvorkin, who oversees Forbes editorial, said that “Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent,” according to Carr. As my colleague Howard Baldwin has pointed out, that comment makes us freelancers feel like we belong in a museum. (Getting old is a theme for Howard. See his blog, “Middle-Age Cranky.”)

Meanwhile, social media consultant Paul Gillin recently passed along this trailer to an upcoming documentary, “Fit to Print,” on the dying news business. While melodramatic, what this clip does not exaggerate is the level of fear among professional journalists.

It’s the end of the journalism world as we know it. The big question is: what’s next? I hope this conference gives me at least some possible answers. Tune in next week to find out.

For the first couple of years I was freelancing, I just signed on the dotted line when it came to contracts. I didn’t want to read the fine print because, frankly, I needed the money. It was depressing enough that virtually every contract granted copyrights to my work in any and all forms in existence now or ever to be invented in the future, throughout the universe.

But curiosity and concern finally won out, so now I’m reading the contracts more carefully. I’m alarmed at what I find in some of them:

The writer pays for the lawyers: This clause specifies that I agree to indemnify the publisher from damages, costs and expenses that the publisher incurs because of copyright infringement or even the claim of copyright infringement. Some contracts specifically state that I am to protect and defend the publisher against such lawsuits at my own expense. I have never been accused of infringement in 25 years as a journalist and will gladly promise that my work does not infringe. But editors change wording, sometimes in major ways. It’s not fair to hold me responsible for a mistake an editor introduced into the article. And what if some kook out there falsely accuses me and the publisher of infringement?

The writer sells her soul: A contract I recently declined not only asked me to indemnify the company – a multi-billion-dollar corporation that is a household name – against any claim of infringement, it also wanted rights to use my name, voice, likeness and biography to promote its website in whatever way it wanted. This was for an initial story paying $400.

The writer stops freelancing: Last year I was presented with a contract to work with a custom publishing firm to produce a corporate magazine, again for a Fortune 500 client. It was no surprise that the contract had a section covering confidential information. Routinely, the contractor promises not to divulge or use any confidential information from the client for any other purpose other than that expressed in the agreement. But this contract stipulated that I could not, ever, disclose or use any information not only about this particular client but any client of the custom publisher. It wasn’t limited to trade secrets or even to information obtained during the course of producing the magazine. It was any information, forever, about any client. And I didn’t even know who the other clients were.

Most publishers are reasonable when I call their attention to these inequitable clauses. They are willing to work with me to make changes that satisfy both our needs, even though they sometimes say I’m the only writer who’s ever raised such questions. Although I have lost some business from a couple of inflexible publishers, so far I’ve been able to afford to do that. I hope that luxury lasts.

A story of mine in this week’s Electronic News reports on a trend that many in the U.S. high-tech industry find disturbing. The latest 10-year jobs forecast from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that U.S. semiconductor manufacturing is going to lose 146,000 jobs, or more than 30 percent of its workforce, by 2018. That’s the second highest job loss of any industry, just behind retail department stores. It even beat out such passé industries as printing and newspaper publishing (projected to lose 95,000 and 81,000 jobs, respectively.)

The fact that manufacturing jobs are moving offshore is old news. On close examination, however, the BLS statistics indicate a flight of high-level jobs. Not only research and design engineering, but also top management functions, are leaving the country. In fact, in the management category of semiconductor and electronic component manufacturing, the BLS projects a 35-percent loss in the number of jobs. For chief executive officers in particular, the projection is 41 percent.

Some will quibble about how the BLS arrives at this forecast, but anecdotal information from a few executive recruiters backs up the trend. Tim O’Shea, group leader for the semiconductor industry practice at Heidrick & Struggles, has clients asking him to find executives willing to move offshore. “Management is being displaced,” agrees Al Delattre, global market managing director of technology at Korn/Ferry International.

The recruiters are alarmed about the trend. The semiconductor industry warns that the United States is losing its competitiveness. My livelihood is threatened. The industry that I’ve covered for 25 years might disappear from this country, taking with it a lot of the trade and technical publications that are my customers.

But if you take out the jingoism and think in terms of pure capitalism, it all makes perfect sense. Twenty years ago, manufacturing jobs moved to places where costs were lower and labor plentiful. Now, it looks like knowledge workers are going through the same transition. Anyone who’s read Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” shouldn’t be surprised. The Internet and telecommunications technology make it possible to do many types of knowledge work from anywhere, so knowledge workers in low-cost areas are going to get a good portion of these jobs. Recognizing this, companies are starting to shift their knowledge workforce, not only by hiring offshore workers, but also by moving their current workers to low-cost regions. Last April, for example, I reported on IBM’s Project Match, whereby the company offered to hire laid-off North American workers for jobs in India and other low-cost countries.

The flight of U.S. executives will continue. After all, how many good reasons can you think of for keeping these executives in the United States? Most of the semiconductor industry’s customers are in Asia. Even if the CEO lives in the States, he spends most of his time traveling to visit customers, business partners and suppliers. Thanks to Wall Street’s meltdown, American finance is increasingly owned by foreigners. Plus, as semiconductor industry lobbyists love to point out, U.S. tax law and regulations make this country a less and less attractive place for business. In fact, one recruiter tells me that the executives of at least one chip company are thinking about moving its headquarters to Singapore because of the high costs of being a U.S.-based public corporation.

Maybe I should move, too. From a business point of view, there’s no reason to stay in this country. It’s not like I have to report to some green-eye-shaded editor wielding a pencil and shouting at the typesetter. I already work with all my clients via the phone, e-mail and Internet. Less and less of my work is actually printed on paper in a factory. It’s all online. U.S. newspapers and news agencies already outsource some of their journalism work to India. To remain competitive, I should move to a low-tax nation in a good climate with excellent Internet and telecommunications service.

The world is changing – quickly and dramatically. I don’t think there’s any stopping this. Businesses are recognizing this. Journalists, accountants and x-ray technicians are recognizing this. Government and industry leaders around the world would do well to recognize these forces and work with them, rather than raising fears and fomenting unrest about the offshoring of American jobs.

I have to admit that I haven’t been following the evolution of the health insurance reform legislation in Congress. That’s because it was making me sick. When I saw old people whipped into a frenzy by Republican extremists circulating misleading information about government death panels, I simply tuned out. It’s just not worth raising my blood pressure over. Literally. If I get sick, or even if I go to the doctor for my annual checkup, I pay out of my own pocket. At least, the first $2,600 of it every year.

That’s the deductible on the health insurance plan that I buy through the State of Maryland. You see, I have personal experience with a “public option,” and not by choice. When I went out on my own as a freelance writer, I could not buy private health insurance. It’s not that I could not afford it. It’s that no private insurer would sell me a policy. At any price.

No, I don’t have a terminal disease. I’ve never had cancer. Don’t have HIV. Or a heart condition. Or even high blood pressure. (For some reason, it’s incredibly low. A nurse once asked me if I was dead.) However, like anyone who’s been on the planet awhile, I do have a few conditions, none of which I consider particularly serious. But apparently the arthritis that I was diagnosed with in my mid 40s – just a few months before I left my job to freelance full time – is enough to make me a leper in the world of private health insurance. No one would touch me.

Maryland is one of 35 states that maintain “high-risk pools” for people who are denied private coverage. The premiums are typically higher than private insurance, unless you fall below a certain income, at which point the rates are partially subsidized. The system has worked well for me so far. I pay my premiums and also contribute regularly to a health savings account, which I can tap into to pay for my own healthcare costs up to the amount of the deductible. Because I pay out of my own pocket, I make more careful choices about what healthcare services to use. I’ve found some helpful sites on the Web (like http://www.healthcarebluebook.com) that tell me what the going rate is for certain services, like x-rays.

I’m grateful, and lucky, that Maryland has such a plan. Freelancers in states without high-risk pools have tough choices. They could become a part-time barista at Starbucks, a company that provides insurance even to part-time employees. They could change their marital or dependency status. (Recently, a friend’s 23-year-old daughter left a job and thought she would buy private insurance, only to find that – because of a melanoma removed from her leg 10 years ago – she was denied. She and her boyfriend moved up the wedding by a year so she could get onto his policy.) They could return to the full-time, traditional workforce.  Or, if they are healthy and feel lucky, they could risk going without insurance.

Whether through a state-run program or by manipulating the private system, people like us are getting by, at least some of us are. Anti-reform zealots complain about the government rationing healthcare. The fact is, healthcare is already rationed – by big companies whose obligation is to make profits, not protect the health of citizens. If we don’t get meaningful reform now, we will in a few years, as a larger percent of the population experiences the arbitrariness and unfairness of the current system in America.