Good Preparation Doesn’t Happen by Accident.
Eric Schilling, a Grammy-winning engineer, live mixer and record producer for artists including Gloria Estefan, Crosby, Stills & Nash, David Bowie, Frank Sinatra, Shakira and others, has also been the music mixer for the Grammy telecast for the past several years. It’s one of the jobs he’s most prized, and that gave him grounding in all three areas he enjoyed: working in recording studios, mixing live sound and mixing high-intensity broadcast events like the Grammys. But he almost didn’t make it for this year’s event.
Last July 13, as Schilling was driving on the Florida Turnpike to mix the live sound for a Gloria Estefan show in Miami, a car driven by an unlicensed, uninsured 17-year-old spun out in front of him. Schilling could not veer away in time. The collision destroyed the BMW 330i sedan he was driving; it also put him into Miami’s Ryder Trauma Center for four months, nearly half of that in a coma, as doctors addressed multiple internal injuries and shattered limbs. When he awoke, in late August, he was informed that his left leg was damaged beyond repair and would have to be amputated.
It was the nightmare that anyone who spends much of his or her life out on the road tries not to think about. But they should, says Susan Schilling, Eric’s wife and mother of their two children. “No one wants to think about something like this happening, but it does happen,” she says. “One minute you’re pissed off about a bad haircut, and the next minute your entire life is turned upside down.”
It can happen to anyone, and does, with frightening regularity. There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. Nearly 3 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed, based on data collected by the Federal Highway Administration.
Insurance is the best way to defend yourself against catastrophes like this, but simply having a policy in place isn’t enough, as the Schillings learned. The same company insured their three cars, but the policies weren’t linked, which would have provided more resources; in this case, it would have raised the maximum amount of coverage against uninsured motorists from $100,000 to $300,000.
Medical insurance is something an estimated 46 million Americans go without; millions more muddle by with questionable “insurance” schemes that do little more than provide access to pre-negotiated pricing on a limited number of medical procedures, with an often highly restricted pool of service providers.
Even those with decent medical insurance will find themselves fighting with insurance companies on a regular basis, debating whether certain procedures are qualified for coverage. These battles will almost certainly come at a time when your ability to cope is strained. Susan Schilling had to bear the brunt of this battle while Eric lay in a coma for two months. During that time, she also had to try to find and get access to the family’s finances and records. The accident happened just as the Schillings had purchased a new home but before they were able to sell their previous house. Then it was learned that Eric had cancelled his disability insurance literally weeks before his accident, as a cost-cutting measure while they had to carry the financial load of two homes, college tuition for the children and a recently purchased Digidesign ICON console. All this would have put enormous strains on their finances even without an accident.
The Schillings’ experience underscores what can be done ahead of time. For starters, every independent contractor should carry their own medical and disability insurance. It’s costly, but far less so than what medical care and lost income would cost without it. If you incorporate yourself as a business, you can also apply for business interruption insurance, which will provide income stemming from the loss of any professional tools or vehicles that were lost or damaged in an accident.
Some of the cost of high premiums can be offset to a degree with a high-deductible strategy. By opting, for instance, for a $5,000 deductible on your medical insurance, you can lower premiums by as much as half versus a $500 deductible. However, be aware that by doing this, you are essentially selfinsuring yourself for the first $5,000 of any occurrence, per year. That means keeping an emergency fund with at least that much money in it on hand at all times. To soften the blow of that, take advantage of a Health Savings Account (HSA), which, though the idea has been around for a couple of years, is just now finally being rolled out widely by banks. You can shelter $2,850 a year from taxes in an HSA, and you can add an additional $1,500 during the year you turn 55; funds can only be withdrawn for medical bills, but for someone in a 28 percent tax bracket, it offers a direct savings of almost $800.
Eric and Susan Schilling received help from a number of quarters, including from MusiCares, the Recording Academy’s own emergency fund for members in need. And it’s a measure of the esteem the industry holds Eric Schilling in that a separate fund started by friends and administered through Hit Factory Studios in Miami has brought in a substantial sum of money. Gloria and Emilio Estefan also provided hotel rooms for Schilling’s family throughout his stay in the hospital.
As wonderful as that was, it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to Schilling’s longterm medical and rehabilitation bills. It will be a long road, one on which you learn things you might never have thought about before, like there is a good-better-best approach to prosthetic legs, again based on how much you can spend.
It’s disingenuous to say that seeing Eric Schilling at the console to mix the Grammy Awards last February, scarcely more than six months since his accident, was a wonderful sight. But even he would say that you can be missing a leg without missing a beat. It would have been better had it never happened, but it did, and it can happen to anyone. Take the time to put some defenses in place.
