When the outspoken pop-music phenom Chappell Roan won the Grammy for best new artist in 2025, she took the stage in Los Angeles to collect her statuette and to issue a warning to her industry – pay your artists, and give them something else they desperately need: health insurance.
“Record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection,” the 27-year-old Roan told more than 15 million TV viewers. “Labels, we got you, but do you got us?”
Roan’s message resonated with the multitudes of mostly unknown musicians and other creative artists who fall between the cracks of a health care system anchored by employer-based insurance. Even after the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, surveys suggest as many as one of five members of the creative community still lack health coverage.
Roan’s words were music to the ears of one well-known figure in Austin, Texas, and its vibrant music scene: Shani Hébert, better known as DJ Shani, whose popular weekly show on KUTX radio is called “The Groove Temple.”
Hébert, now 47, had returned to her native Chicago to care for her ailing mother in 2013 when she began to notice that she herself was having health problems, such as declining vision and a limp – the first signs of what doctors eventually diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. But Hébert was slow to treat the ailment because – like nearly half of all people in the music business at that time – she had no health insurance.
Ironically, it was a cigarette break that changed her life, for good. After she returned to Austin, Hébert was at a fundraiser for the homeless when she struggled up to the rooftop to smoke. Sweaty and out of breath, she recalls, she sat down next to a woman who was the director of enrollment for the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, or HAAM.
Today, Hébert enjoys health coverage through a $4 million partnership between HAAM and Central Health, a lower-cost public health provider in the Austin area, that helps several thousand members of the city’s thriving music community to get coverage for no cost or at reduced, subsidized rates. Her coverage through HAAM allows her to get regular doctor visits as well as periodic MRIs that track her MS.
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Hébert, who, with her cane, is a familiar presence on the Austin music scene, including at fundraisers for HAAM, said in a recent interview she’s grateful to stay on top of her disease and, “Of course it has to do with HAAM, because now I can get an IV of steroids if I can’t see or if my legs don’t work. So I’m very thankful that I’m in a better position than I was before.”
Roan’s plea, Hébert’s struggles and HAAM’s efforts are part of a uniquely American tale spawned by a health care system that fails to meet the needs of a broad swath of citizens. Without an expanded system of public health care options, creative artists in a ruthless gig economy continue to struggle to get any coverage.
Those troubles were only compounded when majority-conservative states like Texas refused to sign up for expanded Medicaid eligibility under the ACA, and when Congress refused to extend the subsidies that held down costs of ACA Marketplace insurance for millions of Americans. Officials at HAAM were electrified when Roan’s nationally televised plea brought attention to the crisis.
“I think that HAAM is a wonderful example of what a dedicated community can do to solve health care access problems for musicians,” Rachel Hanss Blair, the group’s director of strategy, said. “People tell us all the time that, one, HAAM saved their life, that two, they came to Austin because of HAAM, and then three, that they’re not leaving Austin because of HAAM.”
Other cities with flourishing music scenes – such as Denton, Texas, a college town lined with music venues, or Seattle, the birthplace of grunge – have formed similar organizations to help them navigate the U.S. health care maze.
Roan’s well-publicized Grammy remarks were directed at the major record labels, which have contracts with the most successful musicians such as herself. But while most industry watchers feel the labels can do better, there are reportedly some 3,500 musicians recording for the three major labels who are insured through the SAG-AFTRA union – although others who appear on their recordings often don’t earn enough money to meet an income threshold.
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Before she became a superstar, in 2020, Roan was dropped by the record label she’d initially signed with and found herself without health insurance just as the COVID-19 pandemic was hitting U.S. shores. “When I got dropped, I had zero job experience under my belt,” she said in her 2025 Grammys speech. “And like most people, I had a difficult time finding a job in the pandemic and could not afford health insurance.”
After her speech, Roan backed her words with her money by working with an organization called Backline Care to fund mental-health support for musicians, sparking the creation of a mental health and crisis support hotline called B-Line that is staffed with professionals. Roan’s initial $25,000 gift for a fund called “We Got You” was matched by other stars like Charli XCX, Noah Kahan and Sabrina Carpenter.
But most musicians in a city like Austin – a crossroads of country, Americana, rock and other brands of music celebrated on Austin City Limits, at South by Southwest, and in packed nightclubs like Antone’s – live a world apart from Roan or Carpenter. Most play club gigs or work in bands that don’t qualify for that kind of union insurance. And there are as many as 8,000 musicians in the greater region, according to the group Austin Texas Musicians.
Playing those nightly shows can be physically exhausting work, but there was no organization working to connect Austin’s music makers to health insurance until HAAM was launched in 2005 – five years before the passage of the ACA, also known as Obamacare.
“When HAAM was founded, members accessed the local charity care clinics because the ACA didn’t exist,” Blair said. The organization worked on building an affordable care network that’s connected to the H-E-B Wellness Primary Care program that serves employees of the popular South Texas grocery chain and others who are eligible to access its clinics and services like mental health care.
As HAAM grew to its current list of 3,800 clients – musicians, music teachers, or DJs like Hébert – and as the ACA took root in the early 2010s, HAAM also partnered with Sendero Health Plans and Central Health, Austin’s public hospital network, to provide health insurance that is fully subsidized for those meeting the income requirements. Under HAAM, the insured rate for musicians in the Austin area has soared to an estimated 95%, and its members have received about $215 million in covered medical care.
It’s a success story, and yet HAAM is seeing its work get harder, not easier. That’s largely the result of changes to the ACA Marketplace during the Donald Trump administration, most notably the elimination of the tax-credit subsidies that had held down premiums since the COVID-19 years.
“Our uninsured rate went up significantly from one year to the next, from ‘25 to ‘26,” Blair said. HAAM has strived to raise additional funds – increasing its budget by $250,000 to $800,000 – but with the increased costs the organization is serving fewer people.
Blair agrees with a growing number of policy and lawmakers that the ultimate health care solution is for the federal government to provide public options. That would make it even easier for freelancing creators to get insurance while pursuing work in music or art.
“Just living modern life is complicated enough without having to jump through a million hoops to get your basic needs met,” Blair said. “I would personally love to see the Affordable Care Act more immune to political impulses or ideology. We need durability.” It’s hardly surprising that a growing number of Democrats in November’s midterm election are supporting sweeping reforms like a Medicare-for-all option, or a lower cost public-option insurance.
That would allow more performers like Austin’s DJ Shani Hébert to keep the records spinning. In her tune-filled adopted hometown, music boosts both the quality of life and the economy. “I am a child of hippies, but I also understand the value of a dollar,” she said. “And if we are providing something to the GDP, then there’s something that we can all benefit from.”