Why I Hate Emergency Benefit Concerts

by Adam Huttler, Executive Director at Fractured Atlas

I suppose I should be happy that today’s NY Times features a big old article on the impact of our national healthcare crisis on jazz musicians. Maybe the national media is finally noticing this problem, which has plagued artists from every discipline for as long as I can remember. But it’s unfortunate that the piece is entirely focused on a couple of feel good stories about jazz musicians putting together emergency benefit concerts for their colleagues who are facing life-threatening health problems and crippling medical bills.

These kinds of events are actually rather common, especially in the music community. It’s genuinely inspiring to see artists band together like this to support their own in a time of need, and I applaud the jazz musicians mentioned in the article for stepping up to the plate in a big way. And some of the folks in the article are friends of mine who I respect a great deal, such as Wendy Oxenhorn. But it is dangerously misguided to view this kind of thing as anything resembling a real strategy for addressing our industry’s healthcare challenges.

It’s like deciding that we’ll solve homelessness by hosting a fundraiser for each homeless person we find so that we can raise a bunch of money and buy him a house. If you’re lucky it works once. If you’re a profoundly gifted fundraiser it might work twice. But you’re doing nothing about 99.999% of the people who are impacted by the problem. Worse, you’re barely even helping the specific people you’ve targeted, since the underlying problem that caused their homelessness in the first place remains unaddressed, which means they might soon be homeless again.

So what’s a better approach? I’d argue that we need a combination of affordable health insurance, preventive outreach and education, and aggressive advocacy in the public policy sphere. Not very sexy, I admit, but substantive, scalable, big-picture efforts often aren’t.

In light of that, it’s a disservice to the community that the NY Times dedicates a huge article to the topic of artists’ healthcare — the first time I can ever recall it doing such a thing — and there is a grand total of one throwaway sentence alluding to the need for actual, affordable health insurance. We deserve better.

Adam Huttler is the Executive Director at Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit technology company that helps artists with the business aspects of their work. To learn more about Fractured Atlas, or to get involved, visit us here.