Musicians Deserve Healthcare—Just Like Everyone Else
Chappell Roan’s Grammy acceptance speech applies to me and you, too.
I did not have health insurance between January 2020 and June 2024, save for a couple of months here and there when I managed to come up with the roughly $500 necessary to get the cheapest coverage available to me in New York. I never went to the doctor. There was a global pandemic in full swing, and I, like many other Americans, was just hoping I didn’t get seriously ill.
I was also a working independent musician during this period, and still am. In summer 2020, while much of the world was still isolating, my band masked up and went into the studio to finish an album we’d started just before the pandemic. Our audience isn’t huge, but it is devoted. When we got back on the road in 2021, we would sometimes hear from fans about how our music had helped them through the lockdown months. That made me feel like the risks were worthwhile, that we weren’t just indulging our own desire to play together again, though of course we were doing that too.
