[ RadSafe ] Re: Insurance for Nuclear Workers

[Richard Urban Jr]

FYI, if you have not been informed yet...
Mike Rennhack runs a website that is primarily devoted to U.S. Commercial 
Nuclear POWER PLANT workers, and/or contract workers elsewhere involved with 
radiological subjects, such as cleanups or U.S. Dept of Energy (A-bombs) 
sites, very little is addressed to nuclear medicine other than job 
listings...  www.nukeworker.com.  If you were to visit his site, you would 
see many posts regarding insurance coverage.

Here in the United States, as a contract worker going from one refueling 
outage to the next, from one company to the next, and having long durations 
of unemployment, our various employers do NOT extend healthcare insurance 
during unemployment, nor does it transfer easily from one company to another 
(and the rates and coverage are not that great to begin with). 
Additionally, there are usually 'miniumum length of service' requirements 
with each company BEFORE you are covered (hard to reach when outages are 
only 4-8 weeks), and family coverage is an additional cost as well.
The Consolidated Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) was mentioned in one of 
the postings, this was an act of US Congress to enable temporary 
continuation of insurance benefits between jobs, but the rates are quite 
high considering most of us are not earning a paycheck (or not as big a 
paycheck) between contracts.

What Mike is attempting to offer is a SINGLE insurer, with unchanging rates, 
that we migrant nuclear workers here in the America's can take advantage of, 
instead of having to constantly change insurers, coverages, options, etc... 
NOT additional coverage JUST because we work with radiation.

Good on ya Mike, keep it up!!

Richard Urban (Thankfully covered under my wife's insurance)
Yuma, AZ


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "parthasarathy k s" <ksparth at yahoo.co.uk>
To: "Michael Rennhack" <rennhack at hotmail.com>; <radsafe at radlab.nl>; 
<ksparth at yahoo.co.uk>
Sent: Sunday, June 19, 2005 7:53 AM
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Inshurance for Nuclear Workers


> Dear Radsafers,
>
> Michael Rennhack's suggestion of introducing special insurance for workers 
> in nuclear industry implies that the profession carries extra risk.Work in 
> nuclear industry is no riskier than that in any other profession.It is 
> safer than any other industry. Nuclear workers are less exposed 
> occupationally than others. The radiation dose generally is of the order 
> of a few mSv. Occupational exposures to nuclear workers are thus well 
> within the limits prescribed by the International Commission on 
> Radiological Protection (ICRP).
>