Amanda Palmer Unleashes The Voice Of The People About Health Insurance Via Twitter

from the it-all-comes-together dept

most small-to-mid-level musicians i know don't have health insurance. some musicians find tricky ways, some pay, most take the risk & pray.

when i was in my early twenties, buying my own insurance would have been equal half my rent. it just didn't seem like an option. my parents had just watched the death of my step-brother (uninsured when stricken with a disease) almost destroy the family bank, and so they DEMANDED i get insurance.

we fought.

they offered to pay half.

i agreed.

i was lucky.

many aren't.

quick twitter poll. 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)? — Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) October 14, 2012

people OUTSIDE the US were looking at all the tweets from the US and feeling really, really, really bad for us. and some younger tweeters (teenagers, i can only assume) were shocked that we americans don't have what they have (the NHS was getting a lot of love and support from the brits, especially seeing as it's under threat).



people INSIDE the US couldn't believe what people OUTSIDE the US didn't KNOW. this is the amazing power of twitter sometimes. we all think we share common knowledge, and then something like this pops up and BAM – you see a whole bunch of people in different countries shocking the hell out of each other. we all know that lance armstrong doped, that lady gaga gained weight, , etc….but tons of people in the UK/Finland/Australia/etc don't know the extent to which US people FREAK OUT on a daily/monthly/yearly basis about insurance. how much it changes our lives. and how EVERYbody has a story.

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As mentioned, last week, we held an all day brainstorming event, bringing together artists and entrepreneurs to talk about the challenges and opportunities that we all face, and to see if there are ways to help each other. I'll have a full writeup on that later this week, but one point that was raised by some of the musicians at the session was that "success" can mean different things to different people, and one full-time musician pointed out that just being able to afford her own health insurance was a kind of "success," in that it showed she'd been able to earn enough to cover that bare minimum of "necessities." So it's interesting to see, just days later, that Amanda Palmer is making a lot of news today with her fascinating #InsurancePoll campaign , which she started after reading Nicholas Kristof's story about his college roommate , who has prostate cancer and is in bad shape -- in large part because he put off going to the doctor since he didn't have health insurance. In response, Amanda realized that many musicians, similarly, do not have health insurance, and she tweeted about it:From there, lots of other people responded with stories about their own health insurance situation, and she decided to ask people more directly about their own health insurance situation with a quick poll question The end result was tons of people responding, most using the #InsurancePoll hashtag.That seemed quite interesting to Amanda, who got a volunteer to start tallying up all of the info. And she noticed some of the commentary, which noted that people in various countries were somewhat unaware of how things were elsewhere:No matter what your stand is on health insurance or healthcare, you can't deny that this bit of information sharing is both powerful and impressive. Amanda and the volunteer are going to tally up all the data and release it when it's ready, which should be interesting as well. While this is hardly a scientific or randomized survey, itinteresting information that is making more people aware of the situation that others are in. When you think about the power of social media to even(outside the normal realms of political fighting), it's really amazing.

Filed Under: amanda palmer, education, health insurance, information, people, sharing, social media