Musicians Terrified Over Possible Obamacare Repeal
After years of jumping around onstage playing bass for Washington, D.C. punk trio Ex Hex, 37-year-old Betsy Wright is dealing with the rarely spoken downside of being a high-energy working musician. The musician's chronic rheumatoid arthritis forces her to take an expensive drug called Enbrel to prevent her joints from fusing – she pays for it with health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act. If Republicans repeal Obamacare, she'll be one of numerous independent artists who, along with more than 20 million Americans, will abruptly lose their coverage.
"We were hoping to do some more touring in the fall, but I don't know how I'm going to be able to do that — I don't know how to get insurance without having a full-time job," Wright tells Rolling Stone. "I don't want to complain, because certainly everyone has to do that, but it's hard. Like most musicians, I'm piecing everything together by teaching lessons and doing gigs."
Although Republicans have ripped Obamacare as a disastrous form of taxing-the-rich socialism since it passed Congress in 2010, the act has given struggling Americans a lifeline for buying health insurance, often for the first time. Musicians have been an especially vulnerable segment of this group — just before the law took effect in 2013, the Future of Music Coalition estimated they were uninsured at a rate of almost three times more than the general population. Many, like Wright, previously patched together insurance plans through spouses (she is divorced) and occasional day jobs (she stopped working as a bookkeeper at a Charlottesville, Va., café when the ACA came along). Others never had insurance and simply did their best to avoid health catastrophes.
"Before, I was able to just fly blind because I was like, 'I just can't afford that and I just have to stay healthy and be lucky,'" says Julian Koster, 42, a Neutral Milk Hotel instrumentalist who did not buy health insurance until he signed up for a $200 monthly Obamacare plan. "I don't know if I could fly blind now. You don't get younger."
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