
{"id":8042,"date":"2009-11-19T12:19:30","date_gmt":"2009-11-19T20:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=8042"},"modified":"2009-11-19T12:19:30","modified_gmt":"2009-11-19T20:19:30","slug":"no-more-benefit-concerts-it%e2%80%99s-time-to-change-the-tune-on-health-insurance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2009\/11\/19\/no-more-benefit-concerts-it%e2%80%99s-time-to-change-the-tune-on-health-insurance\/","title":{"rendered":"No more benefit concerts: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time to change the tune on health insurance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Nan Warshaw and Alex Maiolo<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In January 2008, Drew Glackin, multi-instrumentalist and bassist for the Bloodshot Records\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 band The Silos, died at 44 of an extremely treatable disease because, like so many working musicians, he couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford (or thought he couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford) health insurance.<\/p>\n<p>To ease the financial burden on his family, Drew\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s band mates and peers did what they could: They organized and performed at a handful of benefit shows that honored Drew\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s memory and raised a bit of money. More recently, <!--more-->Bloodshot band The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir had a serious van accident in which most members were injured. Five of the six had insurance, but their bills are nonetheless mounting due to outof-pocket costs and loss of income. Once again, the music community has rallied behind artists in need. Yet the never-ending story of artists putting on concerts to help ailing peers is a tired tune. After the money has been counted, the guitars packed away and the amps rolled back to the van, we still have the same basic problem: not enough musicians are insured.<\/p>\n<p>A 2003 survey of 2,700 U.S. musicians conducted by the Future of Music Coalition found that 45 percent lacked adequate health coverage. The reasons are not entirely unexpected: In addition to cost, many musicians put off getting health insurance because they assume it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unattainable or they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know where to start. Many think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something that they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford now and will have to wait and get later. But that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153later\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can come pretty quick if your tour van hits a patch of ice.<\/p>\n<p>In America, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re taught to believe that big ideas and entrepreneurship are good things, but that belief does you little good if you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t strike out on your own to pursue it in a competitive marketplace. And the lack of affordable, portable health insurance is, at its heart, anticompetitive. Say you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re working for a big company but you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got your own innovation that you want to develop. You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t break out on your own because your family would lose its health insurance coverage. Your great idea is locked up.<\/p>\n<p>The same goes for musicians. Even those artists with something incredible to offer are often forced to stay in a job where \u00e2\u20ac\u201d if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re lucky \u00e2\u20ac\u201d they have stable coverage. This isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t particularly beneficial to employers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c someone else could probably use that job \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s terrible for musicians. This strategy of tying health insurance to employers has affected the entire economy, not to mention the free flow of ideas. Hindering entrepreneurship is hardly an American virtue. At least, it shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be.<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clear that this problem extends well beyond the creative class. Still, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plenty to be learned from musicians, who are essentially freelance or contract employees. Artists\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 paydays are contingent on a number of variables, from door count at a concert to merchandise sales. In some ways, they aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t all that different from freelance web professionals or software coders, who also go from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gig to gig\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d often without the benefit of consistent health coverage. Artists lucky enough to have a record deal fare no better, as they are not able to get health insurance through their labels \u00e2\u20ac\u201d even if the company wanted to provide it \u00e2\u20ac\u201d because the musicians are independent contractors and are therefore not considered record company employees.<\/p>\n<p>The modern American workforce is mobile and flexible. People are less likely these days to stick with the same employer through retirement, and many of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s job opportunities are contract-based. But our health insurance coverage remains largely employer-based, leaving freelancers, artists and tiny startups with almost no affordable options for coverage. While musicians frequently rally to each others\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 aid, who organizes the benefit show for the uninsured teacher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s aide? Who prints t-shirts for the ailing web coder?<\/p>\n<p>The current health insurance landscape has little harmonization, to borrow another musical term. There are essentially 50 sets of rules for 50 states. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to have a cogent national discussion about possible solutions. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine to have 50 different rules for property insurance \u00e2\u20ac\u201d your property doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t follow you when you move to another location to take a new job. Yet many citizens make forced choices about where they reside based on the kind of health insurance that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s available. This serves only to deepen divisions and complicate the debate.<\/p>\n<p>Meaningful health insurance reform is crucial to all Americans, including musicians. Hopefully, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get there soon. In the meantime, we shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t forget the lessons to be learned from our artists. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not just entertainers; they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re part of our country\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s entrepreneurial backbone. America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cultural and economic wellbeing is inextricably tied to the health of its creators. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an understanding from which we <em>all<\/em> can benefit.<\/p>\n<p><em>Nan Warshaw is co-founder and co-owner of Bloodshot Records, a 15-yearold Chicago-based independent record label and small business incorporated in Illinois (<a href=\"http:\/\/bloodshotrecords.com\/\">bloodshotrecords.com<\/a>).<br \/>\n<\/em><br \/>\n<em>Alex Maiolo is the project coordinator for Future of Music Coalition\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Health Insurance Navigation Tool (HINT), which provides free information to musicians about their health insurance options (<a href=\"http:\/\/futureofmusic.org\">http:\/\/futureofmusic.org<\/a>). He is an insurance broker in Carrboro and plays in the band Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies.<br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Nan Warshaw and Alex Maiolo In January 2008, Drew Glackin, multi-instrumentalist and bassist for the Bloodshot Records\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 band The Silos, died at 44 of an extremely treatable disease because, like so many working musicians, he couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford (or thought he couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford) health insurance. To ease the financial burden on his family, Drew\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s band&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8043,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042\/revisions\/8043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}