About a month after Roan's statement, David Johansen of Glam Punk Pioneer passed away at the age of 75. His death came just weeks after he started GoFundMe to help with cancer treatment.
In 2024, 1990s Alt-Rocker Matthew Sweet suffered a stroke while on tour.
Because he was uninsured, his management team created a similar online crowdsourcing fundraiser.
To date, he has raised more than $640,000 to support his long-term recovery.
But such crowdsourcing is a stopgap, says Tatum Hauck-Allsep, founder and CEO of Nashville-based Music Health Alliance, which helps musicians negotiate health costs.
“In some cases, something like GoFundMe is a great resource, but in other cases it's just a patch. I want to find a long-term solution,” Hauck-Allsep told AFP.
She praised the issue on loans, but said insurance from record labels isn't necessarily what artists want.
Still, “There should be an easier path to accessing healthcare,” she said.
Bruce Iglauer, head of Blues Label Aligator Records, reiterated the Hauck-Allsep points, saying the artist is self-employed.
“We guarantee a record of budgets and loyalty rates, but we don't have any other input or knowledge of the income that artists make,” Igler said.
“They don't get weekly wages from us.”
And they say that a thinner margin would make it impossible to provide insurance. “Manufacturing costs have risen and physical sales have declined.
“That's not financially viable,” he added. “I wish that was the case.”
– “Horrible” –
Many American musicians receive healthcare through Barack Obama-era Affordable Care Act, but the reporting is threatened by the Donald Trump administration, which is trying to complicate access to healthcare, and perhaps ultimately ending the system completely.
That would be a “disaster,” said Paul Scott, director of the Austin Musicians Healthcare Alliance, a nonprofit that helps Texas register around 3,200 musicians a year for compensation under the government's healthcare plan.
Many ACA plans aren't cheap yet, but they make a huge difference in access, he said.
Scott said abandoning the ACA is likely to mean an increase in prices that encourages many artists to “drove their health insurance.” “And that will hurt our safety net hospitals and charity care.”
As for Graham, selling his sketches was a successful treatment for his first few weeks.
But his son doesn't know if that's enough.
And Harry's Graham is worried about people who can't find fundraising support thanks to their fame.
“I don't know what anyone else did,” he said. “They would have been another person in serious medical debt.”
“That's scary.”
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