When the music fades: US musicians' healthcare crisis

[Elano]

Woe betide the career musician who falls ill without US health insurance, facing huge medical bills – or no care at all

Josh Homme has a pertinent piece of advice for any musician hoping for help from the American medical system. "If you want to live," says the leader of Queens of the Stone Age, "you better be rich."

Two years ago, Homme's Queens bandmate Natasha Shneider died from cancer, aged just 52. She was put on chemotherapy pills – two a day at $500 a time. Schneider had health insurance that split the cost, but that still left her paying $500 a day for essential treatment. Now Brian O'Connor, the bassist in one of Homme's other bands, Eagles of Death Metal, has been diagnosed with stage-four colon and lung cancer as well as tumours on his bones.

"This was a 6'3" guy," Homme says. "He went from 230lb to 180lb in six months. None of us could understand it. It's just heartbreaking. I'm 37 now and I've been beating myself up my whole life, but I'm insured, I know the status of my own health. Brian is only 44 and his insurance is sorted now, but even when you're insured you still get slow-rolled. The bureaucracy of insurance has become its own problem. Brian's cancer is incredibly aggressive. He needed surgery immediately, so we paid for four days in hospital with a brilliant anaesthetist and one of the best surgeons in America. That was $25,000. If he'd had insurance he would still be waiting for it to clear and he would have had to have $100,000 worth of cover. It's mystifying to me where it's all going."

In the US, every prescription, every visit to the doctor, every stay in hospital must be paid for. If you're in a steady job with the right corporate insurance, you should be covered. But that situation just doesn't apply to musicians, so the likes of O'Connor have been forced into playing a dangerous game. Often unable to afford the premiums, they have to gamble against falling ill, and the odds of that gamble get worse as they get older.

On 23 March this year, the 56-year-old Funkadelic guitarist Garry Shider was working in his small home studio in the suburbs of Maryland when he realised he could not move some of the fingers on his left hand. Shider thought he was having a stroke and alerted his wife Linda, who rushed him to hospital. He was x-rayed and rushed to a larger hospital in Washington DC. Shider had been suffering with a bad cough and intermittent problems with his right leg for months, but he had never really taken the symptoms seriously, and waited for the pains to pass. It turned out to be brain cancer.

Shider had worked with George Clinton since 1971. He'd had some health insurance, mostly through union affiliations, but in recent years he had given them up. "The premiums were $300 a month," Linda says. "We just couldn't afford that."

The man who co-wrote One Nation Under a Groove found money was often tight. After he was diagnosed, a fund was set up to raise money for his treatment at a specialist unit in Texas, but Shider died on 16 June.

Rob Max works for Sweet Relief, a California-based musicians fund that provides assistance to professional musicians who struggling with illness, disability and age-related problems. What he sees is a generation of musicians increasingly unable to cope.

"This is a growing problem," Max says. "For a lot of musicians, insurance is just not economically viable. They're not choosing to be irresponsible – healthcare can cost you thousands of dollars a month, and when you get into your 50s the premiums go through the roof. These fees are way beyond most people's reach."

Singer and songwriter Vic Chestnutt became a friend of Max's. He had hospitalisation insurance left over from his time signed to Capitol Records – it paid for hospitalisation, not drugs or doctors or anything else – that cost him $500 a month, which he struggled to pay.

When he fell ill in early 2009, his insurers paid out $100,000 for three stays in hospital, but the hospital demanded another $70,000 for two operations, later reduced to $35,000. He would also have faced being sued for the cost of two other operations had he not died on Christmas Day 2009, after attempting suicide two days earlier.

Max was also working with Little Feat's drummer Richie Hayward – who had also played with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Robert Plant – until his death in August from liver cancer. Max explains that because Little Feat were a touring act, Hayward saw no money from recordings and could not afford health insurance. "Guys like him will be working full time until they just can't work any more. It's not right. I think of it as like watching a bunch of 70-year-old construction workers still trying to put up a building rather than sitting back and collecting the rent."

If the situation is bad for musicians whose music you might actually know, it is worse for the vast number you've never heard. Carolyn Schwarz works for HAAM (Health Alliance for Austin Musicians), a non-profit organisation which has provided low-cost healthcare – costing around $1,800 a year – for about 2,000 local musicians over the last five years. It receives no public money, and every penny is raised from local people and businesses.

"Our numbers are increasing all the time," Schwarz says. "Musicians, unfortunately, often suffer from the opposite of hypochondria."

Take Steve Reid. One of the world's finest drummers, Reid played on Dancing in the Street aged 16 and later with James Brown, Sun Ra, Miles Davis and Fela Kuti. Between 2006 and 2008 he recorded four albums with the UK electronic artist Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet.

"Steve considered the options and said, 'Fuck that. I'm going to enjoy myself now,'" Hebden says, his new baby daughter gurgling happily on his lap. "He had no insurance. He was, basically, below the poverty line, living in his son's flat in Harlem. But the chemotherapy for his throat cancer was very hard – he'd get the bare minimum of care then he was out, not even a bed to rest in. There was no compassion, even at the end. The hospital was a business and each visit was like a slap in the face for him."

The DJ Gilles Peterson also knew Reid well. "A lot of these musicians didn't make much money even in their prime years – they were always living day to day. But there has to be a way we can help people now."

And help, when it comes, can effect the most incredible change. Lester Chambers is 70. As part of the Chambers Brothers, the pioneering late 60s psychedelic soul band, he recorded the classic Time Has Come Today in 1968. The Brothers' 1970 record Funky was heavily sampled in A Tribe Called Quest's I Left My Wallet in El Segundo 20 years later. He played in Bob Dylan's early electric band, and played on bills with Jimi Hendrix.

He, too, has cancer, and he needs eye, back and dental surgery. He hasn't been able to work for three years, and was reduced to sleeping on people's couches. Recently he received a gift of $10,000 from Yoko Ono and he has now moved into a new house. I call Lester Chambers on his (also new) mobile. He is softly spoken and unfailingly polite.

Ask Chambers if he misses performing and his voice leaps in volume. "Oh my God, do I ever," he says. "I love to sing and play harmonica and I've not been able to for so long." These days his pleasures are a little more prosaic. His first unaided visit to the supermarket was victory enough to lift his mood. "And I've got a new doctor to see," he laughs. "I can't wait to feel better." Now he has hope that he might.

Josh Homme admits he's "very conservative" politically. He doesn't think the government has any better idea how to spend his money than he does, and whenever an administration has tried he's sure they've got it wrong. "But this is such a huge problem," he says. "We can't turn away from it."

[Portugoal]

what does the article say? i'm not reading anything, unless it has pictures.

[Sami]

Damn...Musicians should unionize and refuse to work until they're guaranteed permanent health coverage IMO.

At least if they unionized the union could pool the dues to buy group coverage.

During the health care bill negotiations I had hoped President Obama would support Medicare for All, but I guess not.

Our healthcare system is evil and barbaric.

[NobodyButMe]

health insurance is out of control. unbelievable how they're working the system. evil and barbaric is right.