photo: SHYCITYNikon via Flickr.com

When I served as Recording Vice President of Local 802 from 2010 to 2016, I watched as the club date and hotel live music world dissipated, and with it countless jobs that New York City musicians had taken for granted for decades. Some of the city’s finest musicians were losing work. And, considering that these were union jobs, they were losing their health insurance provided by Local 802’s Musicians Health Fund. Many musicians were finding it difficult to find adequate and affordable health insurance. The Affordable Care Act passed in Obama’s first term, alleviated the problem to a some extent, but most applicants found it confusing and inadequate. Since ACA’s passage, private insurance costs have outpaced inflation and still millions remain uninsured. Whereas about 8 percent of Americans lack health insurance, 43 percent of musicians are without.

For more than 40 years, I have been an advocate for single-payer health insurance, the universal system of healthcare that our Canadian neighbor’s enjoy. Here in the U.S., the system is better known as Medicare For All (M4A), the moniker attached to it by Senator Jacob Javits in 1970, who wanted to expand Medicare coverage to everyone in the country. The idea is fairly simple. Medicare For All would replace private health insurance with a public system that would cover everyone. Patterned somewhat on the current Medicare and Medicaid system, every United States resident would be automatically covered by M4A. But unlike the current Medicare benefit, M4A would require no deductibles or co-pays and would cover all medical services, leaving the choice of providers to the consumer.

Virtually every country in the developed world (and in some developing countries) provides universal health coverage to all its citizens. The United States stands alone in its system of leaving healthcare to private enterprise. At a conference several years ago, I attended a panel discussion on the challenges of touring as freelance musicians. During the Q&A, someone asked, “What do you do if you get sick while touring?” A panelist responded, “We just hope we are touring in Europe!” This a shameful commentary on the healthcare system in the United States, and its past time we change it. This is why I and a handful of AFM locals introduced a resolution at the 2023 AFM convention that mandated the AFM to join the Labor Campaign for Single Payer to advocate, educate and organize for healthcare justice and for a single-payer system that will make healthcare a birthright for everyone in America. In spite of an attempt to substitute another resolution unsupportive of single payer by the convention committee assigned to vet the resolution, the delegates overwhelmingly voted for the original resolution (it is rare for delegates to vote against a committee recommendation), underlining how deeply musicians feel about the issue.

The idea for Medicare for All has been around for almost a hundred years. And since Medicare became law in 1965, the movement has grown. But it wasn’t until Senator Bernie Sanders made it a priority in both his presidential campaigns that the movement grew substantially. When Sanders first introduced legislation in 2013, he had no co-sponsors. In 2014, he had 14. Now, there are more than 15 co-sponsors in the Senate and more than a hundred in the House. Fox News exit polls conducted among voters in the 2020 election showed that 72 percent of the voters in the November 2020 election were in favor of a “government run healthcare plan” despite the fact that Fox chose the most polarizing way to ask the question. (Public Citizen reports that characterizing Medicare for All as “a government run health system” polls lower than characterizing it as “a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare for All, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single public plan.” Putting it that way, it polls at 81 percent.)

The pushback against single payer mostly comes from the insurance industry, legislators who receive money from that industry and those opposed to public programs in general. The single payer model is based on the concept that everybody is in and nobody is out, much like social security. There is no means testing of any kind and private insurance companies are not part of the single payer system. They can offer non-covered insurance for things like cosmetic surgery, but they have no hand in the single payer system. One reason for this is to prevent private insurance from corrupting or destabilizing the system. We have seen this occur with the ACA and with Medicare. Currently, the insurance industry has been able to influence the government by privatizing and weakening parts of Medicare. Programs like Medicare Advantage, private insurance contracted by the federal government to administer Medicare, have overcharged Medicare (and therefor us taxpayers) to the tune of millions. And Medicare Advantage retirees increasingly complain about the program not approving essential services that would have been approved had they remained on traditional Medicare.

The same lobbyists who spent millions trying to defeat the Affordable Care Act during the Obama era, now have close relationships with scores of Democrats who vote in favor of bills that profit the private insurance industry and contribute to the rapid upward spiral of insurance costs on the market built by the ACA. Local 802 Executive Board member Martha Hyde in her article in the April Allegro makes a case against single payer and suggests that a better plan would be a program in Maryland known as All Payer. But the Maryland system, which includes the private insurance industry, has seen insurance costs outpace normal inflation rates, while more than 300,000 Maryland citizens remain uninsured and many more are still under-insured.

Sister Hyde states that one of her main reasons for opposition to Medicare for All is, according to AFM convention delegates from red states, it “would not fly” in their states. But single payer polls well even among Republicans. And we can see from the recent majority support of abortion rights in red states, how people from all over the political spectrum will support policies that benefit the people. She also asserts that the bill would be unlikely to “pass a challenge in the Supreme Court.” No one says this struggle will be easy, but there is a reason people feel passionate about a national travesty that is causing working people pain, hardship (almost a third of Americans live with medical debt) and thousands of deaths (nearly 45,000 die each year for lack of medical insurance, according to an article in the American Journal of Public Health). Frankly speaking, if the labor movement or the civil rights movement had given up because of the Supreme Court or recalcitrant legislators, we would still be looking at a 60 hour work week and separate bathrooms for African Americans.

The fact is that the movement for single payer is growing, despite it currently being stalled in Congress. There are several citizen advocacy organizations working on pushing for the legislation nationally, most of them organized by healthcare professionals in organizations like Physicians for A National Health Program and National Nurses United. Several national unions have affiliated with the Labor Campaign for Single Payer. And with the passage of the resolution at the convention, the American Federation of Musicians is one of them. Additionally, legislation at the state level that would create a single payer system in a singular state has been introduced in at least ten states. One of these states is our own, where the New York Health Act (NYHA) has been introduced. The Act, first brought before the state legislature more than 30 years ago, has gained support over the years to the point where a majority in the legislature now supports it. Like Medicare for All, NYHA would provide medical coverage to everyone in New York.

This will be of interest to Local 802 members. Our Musicians Health Fund (MHF), which covers a fraction of Local 802 members has, for the past 20 years, covered fewer and fewer. (I reached out to the Fund to ask for the latest figures on how many members are covered and was told they don’t give that information to the public, but as a MHF trustee for six years, I observed first-hand the increasing vulnerability of the Fund.) There is no doubt that the Fund has been an impressive achievement for the union, but its viability is questionable if trends continue. The NYHA would cover all residents of New York, as well as all workers who are employed full time in the state, thus musicians covered by the MHF, even if they live in another state, would be covered by this much better benefit.

It is self evident that it is in the best interest of the local to get behind the New York Health Act and lobby to get it passed. Local 802 should endorse NYHA, educate musicians about it and agitate for it. That’s what unions do — and musicians, members or not, would be grateful to us for fighting for something that would greatly benefit all working musicians.

Those interested in helping organize musicians behind Medicare for All or the New York Health Act, contact me at tojohnoconnor@gmail.com. We shall overcome.

Opinion pieces in Allegro, including MEMBER TO MEMBER, do not necessarily reflect the views of other board members, officers, members or staff of Local 802.  To inquire about submitting a piece to Allegro, send an e-mail to Allegro@Local802afm.org