Nonprofits Are Helping Musicians Pay for Insurance in Austin, Texas, and Beyond

AUSTIN, Texas — Musician Zack Morgan jokes that when he lost his corporate job in 2015, it was like being pushed off a cliff. For years, he said, he’d been playing both sides of the Austin coin: tech worker by day, funk keyboardist by night.

“Maybe this is my sign to try the full-time music thing,” Morgan recalled thinking. “Step one in that was: Get health insurance again.”

Austin bills itself as “the Live Music Capital of the World,” but it can be unaffordable for the artists who provide the city with its cultural cachet — and help drive its tourism revenue.

Morgan has supported himself by patching together gigs with a number of bands. To help pay for health insurance, he turned to a local nonprofit, the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, or HAAM.

“That’s part of being able to make this whole thing work,” Morgan said.

HAAM subsidizes the monthly insurance premiums of local musicians who purchase plans through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. To fund the roughly $4 million program, it works with Central Health, a public agency that provides healthcare resources for low-income residents of Austin and surrounding Travis County. Many of the performing artists pay $0 toward monthly premiums.

After more than a decade, including through the coronavirus pandemic, the assistance program has become an established and reliable financial support for Austin’s musician community.

This year, after Congress failed to extend pandemic-era subsidies, premiums skyrocketed for many ACA plans. A recent report found that 5 million people nationwide had dropped the coverage. HAAM helped blunt the impact for its members. It has emerged as a potential model for other cities hoping to make healthcare more affordable for key populations and industries.

Morgan plays keyboard with pop singer Ruthie Craft at the Saxon Pub in Austin on July 27. (Ysa Mendoza/KUT News)

A Growing Idea

Texas had the highest uninsured rate among states, with 19% of people age 64 and under uninsured, as of 2024.

Even before the launch of the ACA marketplace in 2014, HAAM had spent a decade connecting musicians with free and low-cost care at clinics and hospitals in and around Austin. But roughly 85% of HAAM members remained uninsured, leaving them exposed when traveling to gigs in other cities and states.

“When the Affordable Care Act came out, and we knew it was here to stay, it really made sense for us to start getting our musicians fully insured,” said Rachel Blair, HAAM’s chief strategy officer.

Similar nonprofits in other U.S. cities with strong live music cultures, such as Seattle, New Orleans, and Nashville, Tennessee, help musicians get medical care. With the advent of the ACA, some of these organizations began helping musicians navigate the sometimes complex enrollment process for the online marketplaces, though they stopped short of pitching in on premiums.

But the team at HAAM recognized that without direct support to help pay premiums, many of their members would still struggle to retain coverage.

“When you think about the average HAAM member making about $30,000 a year, there’s no way that they would be able to spend a third of their income on healthcare,” Blair said.

The organization’s membership has grown by 77% to more than 3,300 people since HAAM began offering premium assistance, and more than 90% of members are now insured.

To help subsidize costs for members, HAAM partnered with Central Health, which is Travis County’s public hospital district — a type of health agency in Texas charged with using tax dollars to fund safety net healthcare for low-income residents. Central Health also operates the nonprofit Sendero Health Plans, which offers marketplace insurance to Travis County residents.

To qualify, HAAM members must enroll in one of Sendero’s silver-level, or benchmark, plans. If their income is between one and two times the federal poverty level, Central Health pays the balance of their monthly premium after federal tax credits are applied. For members who fall above that income range, HAAM offers a more limited subsidy, covering 50% of their premium balances.

Each year, the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians hosts the HAAM Day Music Festival, its annual event to raise money to help local musicians afford insurance premiums and other healthcare services. Bands play in common spaces across the city, from grocery stores to the Texas Capitol steps. (Shunya Carroll/KUT News)

In 2017, HAAM helped set up a similar program in Denton, a college town north of Dallas that has served as a testing ground for successful musicians, from Meat Loaf to Norah Jones.

The Denton Music and Arts Collaborative works differently: It connects members with an independent insurance agent who helps them find the best health plan for their needs. The nonprofit then offers members a monthly subsidy of $100.

The subsidies are a way of keeping Denton’s culture of jazz and “weird art rock” alive, said the collaborative’s president, Jennifer Kapinos.

“More and more people were maybe graduating college and leaving and going to find better opportunities in other places,” Kapinos said. “People who had lived here a long time suddenly were finding it harder and harder to afford to be here.”

In Austin, other sectors have been watching HAAM’s work. In 2025, Good Work Austin, a nonprofit that advocates for restaurant workers, launched a small pilot program with Central Health to help local food workers enroll in Sendero plans and cover their premiums.

Kit Abney Spelce, vice president of operations for Central Health, said partnering with an advocacy group focused on a particular workforce is key because simply announcing “free insurance for you” doesn’t mean people will sign up.

“We are very much dependent on our partner entity to go out and connect with the community, to have that relationship and that trust,” she said.

Navigating Federal Headwinds

Though premium payments often increase year over year, the 2026 plan year was particularly expensive, increasing by 58% on average.

Citing medical and pharmacy costs, Sendero raised rates by an average of 16% for its enrollees. At the same time, Congress allowed the pandemic-era enhanced premium tax credits to expire, reducing the federal subsidies that many marketplace customers relied on.

“Our premiums for our members went up 60% from one year to the next,” Blair said.

HAAM stepped up its fundraising into 2026, but it wasn’t enough to cover everyone who requested assistance. They had to turn away hundreds of qualified people. Still, they were able to buffer existing members, said Spelce with Central Health.

“We’re going to make sure their monthly premium is paid every month,” she said.

Austin-based Latin-folk singer Gina Chavez plays on the steps of the Texas Capitol in 2025 for the HAAM Day Music Festival, an annual fundraiser for the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians. (Shunya Carroll/KUT News)

A Viable, if Limited, Model

Beyond the eligible musicians they turned away in 2026, another population remains out of HAAM’s coverage reach for premium assistance: Austin’s poorest residents.

Under the ACA, the marketplace plans that HAAM helps subsidize are for low- and middle-income earners, but the people with the very lowest incomes — below 100% of the federal poverty level, set at about $15,000 — are supposed to be covered by expanded Medicaid.

But Texas is one of 10 states that chose not to expand Medicaid after the ACA became law, so many of the poorest Texans remain uncovered.

With no federal subsidies available for that group, HAAM and Central Health have tried to develop separate solutions for this subpopulation. Central Health has its Medical Access Program, an alternative to health insurance that gives low-income, uninsured people access to a network of local care providers. HAAM has also established relationships with primary care providers to serve its uninsured members — but Blair acknowledges it’s not an equivalent benefit to what Medicaid expansion would offer.

“It’s not a very sustainable solution, especially when there’s a really good alternative,” Blair said.

This article is from a partnership that includes KUT, NPR, and KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

from KFF Health News https://ift.tt/IHeqaKZ

Read More

ICMR-NIV study detects insecticide resistance in dengue vector mosquitoes in parts of Pune

The development has been highlighted in a study carried out at the Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Virology (ICMR-NIV), helmed by researchers affiliated with the ICMR National Institute of Translational Virology and AIDS Research (ICMR-NITVAR).

from Top Health News | Latest Healthcare Sector & Healthcare Industry news, Information and Updates: ET HealthWorld : ETHealthworld.com https://ift.tt/GKBMdtw

Read More

The Market Forces Quietly Adding Thousands to Patient Bills

After a failed round of in vitro fertilization this year, Anne Hug’s fertility doctor said she had a single polyp in her uterus that should be removed to improve the chance of pregnancy. Hug, a professor of radiology, learned that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says the procedure can be done in a doctor’s office with local numbing.

Her doctor referred her to a physician at the same hospital, which is part of a large Ohio health system. That doctor’s plan was to do the procedure in a hospital operating room, with anesthesia administered by an anesthesiologist.

Hug balked at the $18,000 estimate.

So she found an obstetrician who said he would do it in the doctor’s office. And she took the required two-week course of a hormone in preparation.

But the day before the polyp removal, the doctor’s office called to say, sorry, but he had to do it in a freestanding surgery center owned by the same system. The health system had bought the OB-GYN practice in 2025, so it called the shots. The next day, Hug recalled, “I’m in a venue I didn’t need or use, with surgical techs and OR nurses running around.”

Though she was scheduled for anesthesia or sedation, she wanted none of it. The doctor numbed the cervix and removed the polyp in a few minutes, with “a few seconds of cramping,” she said. Hug remembers watching pictures of the polyp removal and “talking to the OR crew about snorkeling.”

The estimate for the in-office procedure was around $3,000. The bill when she was forced at the last minute to switch to the surgery center was around $6,000. She now wonders, “How is it legal for these hospitals to force patients to have procedures done in a hospital when professional organizations recommend differently?”

Hug’s experience is a classic example of the predicted outcome of “vertical integration” in the healthcare system, when one company owns or controls multiple parts of a supply chain and can therefore direct patients to more expensive treatment options.

KFF Health News agreed not to publish some identifying details about Hug and her healthcare providers, to protect her patient privacy and ongoing relationship with the hospital system.

In any case, such healthcare integration is occurring at a breakneck pace all across the nation, with endless permutations: Hospitals are buying doctors’ practices and surgery and imaging centers. Insurers are buying doctors’ practices and specialty pharmacies and sometimes merging with pharmacy chains. Hospitals are buying or creating insurers. Private equity firms are behind many of the deals, buying practices, reorganizing operations, paring costs, then selling at a profit in a few years to a hospital or insurer higher up the healthcare food chain.

And while the stated purpose is generally greater efficiency, studies have shown that for patients the net result has been higher prices and no benefit, or worse health outcomes. That’s in part because the purchases have been driven by financial efficiency, not more seamless and attentive care, said Soroush Saghafian, an associate professor at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. What’s more, these transactions occur in a gray zone of competition law, and regulators’ tools to examine or stop them are plodding and not up to the task.

“Antitrust laws aren’t fit for purpose at this point, and the agencies that enforce them are under-resourced,” said Zack Cooper, an associate professor of public health and economics at Yale University who has sounded the alarm about the trend. The tools at the agencies’ disposal are limited — warning letters, lawsuits, and consent decrees modifying the terms of a merger to restore competition — and often slow to get results. Meanwhile, the dealmaking is galloping ahead.

Patients like Hug are often directed to a higher-priced location for procedures. They are effectively required to buy from their insurers’ specialty or retail pharmacy, which may not stock the drug the doctor prescribes or provide it at the lowest price.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department together police mergers in healthcare to protect competition and patient choice. Generally, the FTC oversees hospitals and doctors, while the Justice Department scrutinizes insurers, though their territories overlap and there are gaps. Middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers fall somewhere in between, though in recent years the FTC has taken the lead in this arena. But federal regulators are playing a tough game of catch-up.

Industry Shift

Over the past decade, the number of doctors working for hospitals rather than in private practice has more than doubled. Today 82% of physicians are employed by hospitals, other corporate entities (like insurers), or private equity firms. For example, UnitedHealth Group’s then-CEO said in 2024 that it employed around 10,000 primary care physicians. That did not include UnitedHealth’s 80,000 “affiliated” physicians.

Many of these vertical transactions are too small for the regulatory agencies to spot. Under the 1976 Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, mergers valued over a certain dollar threshold set annually — this year it’s $133.9 million — must be reported for antitrust scrutiny. Many hospital mergers or insurer mergers exceed the threshold. But mergers involving doctors’ practices often do not, leading to consolidation and monopoly by slow accretion.

Cooper and his group, the Health Care Affordability Lab, studied hospital acquisitions of physician practices and found that over 99% of the more than 275 deals examined fell below the reporting threshold. “I’m really struggling with this,” Cooper said. “What you’re talking about is sort of like death by a thousand paper cuts.”

The FTC has brought eight actions or suits against healthcare mergers and acquisitions in President Donald Trump’s second term. “The FTC has made healthcare competition one of our top priorities,” said Daniel Guarnera, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. Nonetheless, he said the agency relied on complaints and news reports to learn about smaller mergers.

The Justice Department has brought only two cases, both challenging hospital-insurer contracts rather than mergers. It has also settled a suit brought by the Biden administration that sought to block UnitedHealth’s $3.3 billion acquisition of Amedisys, a home healthcare agency. The 2025 settlement required the divestiture of 164 home health and hospice locations across 19 states.

After KFF Health News requested an interview, the department’s press office replied in an unsigned email: “You’ve emailed the Department of Justice. Please reach out to FTC’s media team to set up an interview.” Further requests went unanswered.

Guarnera, at the FTC, noted that the agencies’ task is to enforce regulations, limiting the challenges they can bring.

“Some of the market distortion is caused by regulations that have anticompetitive effects,” he said.

For example, countless health policy experts have proposed regulations mandating “site-neutral payment,” a system in which providers would get the same amount for a procedure no matter where it was performed. That would prevent predicaments like Hug’s, in which a vertically integrated system effectively backs doctors into directing patients to a more expensive venue for treatment.

Within the government, the FTC has advocated for new pro-competitive regulations, suggestions that are now under review by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. They are not public, and Guarnera wouldn’t say whether site-neutral payment is included. Meanwhile, the Trump administration in July proposed instituting site-neutral payments for some services for Medicare beneficiaries.

The economic theory adjudicating the pros and cons of vertical integration is “nuanced,” Cooper said.

It is far easier to assess the effects of horizontal integration — when a hospital merges with a hospital or an insurer with an insurer — on patient care and cost. If two hospitals merge and become the only care provider in town, that leaves patients with less choice and can make it easier for the new monopoly to skimp on care and raise prices. There is no way “to walk with your feet” to another hospital system for care, Cooper said.

But with vertical integration, for example, a hospital merger with an insurer and doctors’ practices could in theory diminish friction, compared with a disaggregated system in which every bill is haggled over by different sectors trying to maximize their piece of the pie. Some successful and popular hospital-insurer combinations, such as Kaiser Permanente, are vertically integrated. So merely taking a “sledgehammer” to such mergers could backfire, Cooper said.

But with money on the table and business interests governing healthcare, studies have shown that cons of vertical integration — opportunities for gaming away those beneficial arrangements and raising revenue — prevail.

When Harvard researchers sought to assess the effect of hospital purchases of gastroenterology physician groups on colonoscopy care, the negative impact was clear. “It changed the way they did business,” said Saghafian, the paper’s main author.

All told, quality went down and prices as well as complication rates rose. “What improves is ‘operational throughput,’” or the efficiency with which the system could move patients through colonoscopies fastest with the least staff involvement, Saghafian said. “That’s a financial metric.”

‘It Feels Like Double-Dipping’

While health economists are studying the impacts to help regulators figure out when to act, the horse is out of the barn. All the biggest health insurers have already merged with pharmacy benefit managers, specialty and commercial pharmacies, as well as new lines of businesses that insurers require members to use to manage copay assistance from pharmaceutical companies. For example:

• CVS acquired Aetna in 2018, meaning Aetna subscribers are directed to the CVS Specialty pharmacy through Caremark, its pharmacy benefit manager.
• Cigna owns Accredo (a specialty pharmacy), Express Scripts (a pharmacy benefit manager), and EviCore (which does preauthorization for prescription requests).
• UnitedHealth includes Optum Rx (a pharmacy benefit manager), Optum Specialty Pharmacy, and Optum Infusion Pharmacy.

So when patients change insurers, their steady access to longtime drugs at a predictable price can go out the door.

In Florida, Ari H.’s family uses three high-priced specialty drugs for chronic conditions. All three had long been subsidized by patient assistance programs from their manufacturers. KFF Health News agreed to only partially identify him, because he works for a government contractor where policy has become political and he fears retaliation.

Signing up for a $3,000-deductible plan with a new insurer, Aetna, put a new strain on his family’s finances. On his new plan, he was signed up for all Aetna’s pharmacy-related products, too. He could not choose to order elsewhere. Most importantly, his old insurance counted the copay assistance money toward his deductible, but his new insurer did not, scooping up his patient assistance money from pharmaceutical firms.

“I pay substantial premiums, and I pay my deductible and my out-of-pocket maximum — that’s all paid by me,” Ari H. said. “But now all the copay assistance goes back to them. It feels like double-dipping.”

Ethan Slavin, an Aetna spokesperson, said the company “is committed to helping members choose and use health plans that best meet their health, financial, and lifestyle needs.” He added that the insurer offers “supports that may lower out-of-pocket expenses.”

Ari H. is right, said Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor who in 2022 launched the Cost Plus Drugs site, which sells mostly generic drugs to cash-paying patients at a discount — often for less than what they would pay using insurance. “It’s crazy stuff,” he said of vertical integration. “The right pocket gives to the left pocket.”

In July the FTC reached a settlement in a suit against Caremark, requiring it to be more transparent and give patients and pharmacies more choice. It had previously reached such an agreement with Express Scripts and is working on one with Optum.

Academics like Cooper are trying to help clarify “which of these vertical deals are bad.” A clearer economic theory, he said, might help regulators make the patient experience just “a little less worse.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

from KFF Health News https://ift.tt/NtcT2iz

Read More

SC flags attacks on doctors in Maharashtra

The court was hearing Mhatre's challenge to stringent conditions imposed by the Bombay High Court while granting him relief in the Dombivli assault case.

from Top Health News | Latest Healthcare Sector & Healthcare Industry news, Information and Updates: ET HealthWorld : ETHealthworld.com https://ift.tt/sg7r1WX

Read More

AI in healthcare: Remote monitoring, ICU optimisation to be next growth frontiers

The report highlighted that as hospitals build necessary data foundations, the gap between early movers and the rest of the industry will widen quickly.

from Top Health News | Latest Healthcare Sector & Healthcare Industry news, Information and Updates: ET HealthWorld : ETHealthworld.com https://ift.tt/0d8IQye

Read More

Passive smoking deaths up 50% since 1990: Study

While India's age-standardised exposure prevalence declined from 43.2% to 30.6% over the last three decades, the absolute number of people exposed rose from 375 million in 1990 to 444 million in 2023, an increase of 18.4%. The health toll also rose sharply, with deaths attributable to second-hand smoke climbing from 217,700 to 325,600 during the same period.

from Top Health News | Latest Healthcare Sector & Healthcare Industry news, Information and Updates: ET HealthWorld : ETHealthworld.com https://ift.tt/3LbO7Sj

Read More

Develop best medical devices for global customers; govt will 100 pc fund acquisition of testing equipment: Goyal

Addressing two events of the pharma industry here, he said domestic firms should bring technology partnerships, encourage joint ventures, and invite global innovators and large pharma companies to India.

from Top Health News | Latest Healthcare Sector & Healthcare Industry news, Information and Updates: ET HealthWorld : ETHealthworld.com https://ift.tt/3RtVhaA

Read More

Global lung cancer screening lessons offer roadmap for India: AIIMS expert

The report, 'Advancing Lung Cancer Screening: Learning from Implementation in Europe', released by the Lung Cancer Policy Network, identifies four key priorities for a successful screening programme - identifying people at highest risk, targeted outreach to improve participation, integrating screening with wider public health initiatives and embedding screening within existing health systems.

from Top Health News | Latest Healthcare Sector & Healthcare Industry news, Information and Updates: ET HealthWorld : ETHealthworld.com https://ift.tt/hYUjsK6

Read More

IIT Madras patents polymer tech that disintegrates bacteria on surfaces without harming human cells

The innovation aims to address an emerging issue globally, namely Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) - the ability of disease-causing bacteria to become "superbugs" and resist conventional treatments.

from Top Health News | Latest Healthcare Sector & Healthcare Industry news, Information and Updates: ET HealthWorld : ETHealthworld.com https://ift.tt/Vk1LysC

Read More

FSSAI to tighten scrutiny, weighs central ban on non-dairy paneer

Rajit Punhani, chief executive officer of FSSAI, said the authority was working on a central regulation on analogue paneer following bans by several states and enforcement action across the country.

from Top Health News | Latest Healthcare Sector & Healthcare Industry news, Information and Updates: ET HealthWorld : ETHealthworld.com https://ift.tt/noVB2Tm

Read More