“The people fighting for the public option are the people I am behind,” says Portland-based musician Lou Thomas, bassist for A Weather and singer/guitarist for Chores. “I have written both my senators and my representative repeatedly about this.” And yet, does this make him feel any more empowered? “I don’t feel particularly empowered, no,” he replies. Thomas has also written a song called “NoInsuranceLand” with his band Chores, the meaning of which isn’t hard to decipher, although it’s not about his own experience or that of any musician, specifically. [In Part 1 of this series, Thomas shared his harrowing health care system survival story.] It’s about any of us, which is part of what makes it a powerful song. The irony is that, while our health care crisis hits musicians particularly hard [again—see Part 1 for details], whether they’re onstage, at work, or conversing with strangers on a bus, the plight of our musicians isn’t going to be the thing that wins enough hearts and minds in order to gain us all affordable access to health care.

“In some cases, a lot of people are going to say, ‘Well, boo-hoo, you want to be a rock star more than you want to work,’ and it’s gonna be tough to get sympathy from a large portion of the country,” says Alex Maiolo, an insurance specialist that offers free advice to musicians through the Future of Music Coalition’s HINT program. (Case in point, the first line in the bio on the Chores website is point-blank: “Chores is a band without pretensions. It’s just four people who love music and hate work.”) “But the arts are what make society what it is. And [one’s art] doesn’t have to be being a rock musician; it can be playing in a symphony orchestra, it could be painting. The thing that keeps us from doing what we want to do is this health care thing.”

It’s an interesting catch-22, in that so much art (music especially) resonates with people because they relate it to their own grind-intensive lives, even as society turns its back on those musicians trying to escape said grind in order to make the art that helps society deal with it. As such, most musicians (and fans) are left out of the debate, armed only with points about morals and ethics but lacking the competitive, big-picture agenda needed to sway “patriots,” captains of industry and others in power. Day by day as the health care debate rages on, we, the un-indoctrinated music lovers, are basically reduced to just sitting with baited breath, scanning the headlines, waiting to see who will make good on an ex-beauty queen’s flailing dementia, rising to the occasion of the low-hanging fruit she dangled out from that undeserved podium. Will it be rock? Metal? Liberal alt-country? Who will become… the Death Panels?

Leave it to Palin to inadvertently conjure the notion of an unborn band. Surely now there are several gestating solely out of a desire to transform the right-wing scare tactic absurdity into the obvious but still awesome band name that it is. They’ll probably share a practice space with the Blue Dogs and Gang of Six, and then, a couple LPs down the road, re-release their early demos in a collection called Pre-Existing Condition, right around the time the guitarist acrimoniously goes solo (as Single-Player, naturally), and the rest continue on as the Trigger Band. Whoever’s immediate destiny this is, however, almost definitely won’t have much by way of access to affordable health care.

Seriously, though—all this snappy jargon is getting out of control. It may make for handy punditry, but what the hell are people actually talking about? Who are these people, whose side are they on, and why can’t we just go to the doctor? Perhaps a bit of a glossary would help:

Single-Payer Healthcare System: A system in which all the nation’s medical needs are paid for by one single entity—the government—instead of a bunch of separate, competing, profit-driven entities (i.e. insurance companies). Some people confuse single-payer with “socialized medicine,” and in fact some politicians do this intentionally to strike fear into the hearts of citizens programmed to have faith in unfettered capitalism as the lord’s chosen way, even though it’s capitalism that’s left so many already without health care (or pensions, or homes, or nutritious food, or uncluttered public space, or a sustainable environment…). In reality, under a socialized health care system, the government would actually own all the hospitals, employ doctors directly, and not only fund but provide medical services itself. Nobody’s suggesting anything like that at all. Medicare is a popular single-payer system already in place in America for people age 65 and above, therefore a nationwide, all-ages single-payer system is also sometimes referred to as “Medicare for All.” “There are people out there who think that the free market is the solution to everything,” says Maiolo, who is also a businessman when not playing music in one of his two bands. “There are certain things too precious and too important to turn over to private industry, and the national health is one of them.” A national single-payer system is the only system that removes the profit motive from the health game once and for all, but unless you’ve got a few billion to spend on influence, lobbying, and campaigning, it’s gonna be tough to get this message out.

Blue Dogs: An actual formal group of 52 right-wing Democrats called the Blue Dog Coalition. They’re good for turning traditional Republican strongholds into electoral map blue zones, though not much else. They tend to be pro-war and anti-choice, etc., and make friends among Republicans by being adamant fiscal conservatives, tending also to oppose spending on things like welfare, and in this case, universal health care. They insist that a public option, if there is a public option, cannot be so cheap as to run the private industry out of business—a stance which perpetuates the conservative myth that any public option at all would bring about the end of private insurance. Not true; with a public option, private insurance would still exist, and many would likely still choose it.

Public Option: An idea that leaves the private health insurance system intact, but competing against an option provided by the government. The government option would theoretically be cheaper, less discriminatory, and offer better coverage, forcing private companies to lower their rates and expand coverage too, in order to win our business. Sounds better than nothing, but could also be doomed from the start—more on this later.

The Gang of Six: Sadly, no relation to British post-punk. It’s a group of three Republican and three Democratic senators from the Senate Finance Committee working to come up with a bill with bipartisan support. Sounds nice, but theirs is a political goal, which considers political support more important than the actual goal of getting the most affordable health care to the most people. It’s also worth noting, as did the Associated Press, that Gang members have received a cumulative $10.7 million in campaign contributions since 1989, “from the industries and people with the most at stake financially in the overhaul effort… more than triple the roughly $560,000 average for all other senators and representatives.” The inherent problem with their mission is that Republicans are typically against any government interference of private industry, therefore a bill with Republican support will likely achieve far
less coverage than the Democrats (or us millions without health care) would like, and almost definitely won’t include a public option. To wit, the leader of the Gang (Max Baucus, Democratic senator from Montana) just released his draft of a bill with no public option, that squeezes the middle class, leaves Medicare vulnerable to cuts, leaves insurance companies in total control—and yet it still got no Republican support. Looks like this draft won’t go very far, but whatever bill they do ultimately come up still has to pass through the House, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated that any proposal without a public option would never get the votes it needs to pass.