Arts organizations stumble into the healthcare debate

Several years ago I stopped into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood to visit a friend who had unexpectedly landed there for an emergency procedure. Cedars had a well-known program of installing actual art in patients' rooms, rather than bland designer graphics or cheap reproductions. My friend was a well-respected museum curator and critic, so I was especially puzzled to encounter an ordinary scarf unceremoniously taped to the wall opposite her bed.

"What's that?" I asked.

"My scarf," she moaned. "Underneath is the ugliest watercolor I've ever seen. It's making me sick."

Today, a coalition of 21 national arts organizations entered the healthcare reform debate with three really good prescriptions -- and one really bad one. In additional to its helpful ideas, the coalition also wants "a healthcare reform bill that will support arts in healthcare programs, which have shown to be effective methods of prevention and patient care."

Uh, not always.

Clinical art therapy might be a perfectly legitimate, even beneficial medical specialty. But whatever the case, when I want advice about a medical procedure, I'd rather ask my doctor than a national coalition of arts organizations.

Under the umbrella of Americans for the Arts, the Washington, D.C.-based arts lobbying group, the coalition smartly asked Congress to pass a reform bill that acknowledges the unique difficulties artists confront in obtaining healthcare.

"Like others who have fallen through the cracks of the current system," the press release correctly says, "many in the cultural workforce work independently or operate in nontraditional employment relationships, leaving them locked out of group healthcare coverage options."

They call on Congress to pass a bill that will:

1) create a public health insurance option for individual artists, especially the uninsured, and create better choices for affordable access to universal health coverage without being denied because of pre-existing conditions.
2) help financially-strapped nonprofit arts organizations reduce the skyrocketing health insurance costs to cover their employees without cuts to existing benefits and staff while the economy recovers. These new cost-savings could also enable nonprofit arts organizations to produce and present more programs to serve their communities.
3) enable smaller nonprofit and unincorporated arts groups to afford to cover part- and full-time employees for the first time.

These proposals ably demonstrate a pressing need within a large sector of the public. (Americans for the Arts has estimated that nearly 6 million Americans are employed in the nonprofit sector.) They also demonstrate a pressing need within a creative class that is regularly punished for nonconformity. And they show the fiscal multiplier effect -- what we lose elsewhere because of sky-high medical expenses -- in our current system, which costs twice as much as the average for industrialized nations while ranking Americans at No. 42 in life expectancy. 

That's a worthwhile effort, especially in the face of the bald-faced lies being uttered -- or, more often, yelled -- in the current healthcare discussion. But inserting art into the dialogue? That's giving me a headache.

Partly it's a symptom of the therapeutic fallacy that plagues our sentimentalized culture. I wonder whether there's a pill to remedy the inanity that art is supposed to be good for you?

And partly it's old-fashioned special pleading. Just about the last thing we need right now is yet another distraction from a debate that should be about the delivery of healthcare to every American.

-- Christopher Knight

Photo: "Eleanor Antin, R.N.," 1976

Credit: The artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Comments

[craig]

A great article on the subject of health care.

http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2008-fall/mandatory-health-insurance.asp

[Donald Frazell]

See CK, we can agree. Artists are workers, just like others, or are supposed to be. They are not "special", and apart from humanity, no matter how much the general populace would like to get rid of them. Nothing is more annoying than a moralizing Hollywood type, who doesnt exactly live the life of a responsible family person with job and bills one stretches to pay. Most creative types are in film and pop music, not the visual arts, jazz or classical, or theatre. WeHo is NOT America to the heartland, and has far different issues.

And non profit art organizations are no different than any other non profit, like food banks and housing like Habitat for Humanity. Who get down and dirty into the harshest places in America, not the glamour neighborhoods. They certainly are not special. If people want it, they will pay for it. It is not up to the taxpayer to pay for things with no relevance to most of America.

And lord knows contempt art is irritating, its all about the artiste, what dying person wants to see a 20 something whining about how hard life is? Simply allow people to bring in what they like and give a hook to put something on the wall a cezanne, a cross, mirror, whatever. Flowers are the greatest art work of nature, far better than 99.999% of human work. Plants and company do better than artworks. And a Bible better than the LA Calendar section for most.
Fact. Not Hollywood fiction.

art collegia delenda est

[Caron Mosey]

Excellent article, and I agree 100%. I am a fiber artist, my husband a woodworker. Unless I work a "real" job, we are doomed when it comes to health care. We can't afford not to have one of us working outside the art field. And, in doing so, the time available for me to focus on my art is minimal. The stress doesn't help the blood pressure, that's for sure!

Caron at BrooksideCreations.com

[Joeventures]

You seem to really miss the point of what you call the "bad prescription."

Including the arts in prevention and care programs has absolutely nothing to do with who you ask about medical procedures.

In prevention programs, both visual and performing arts are utilized to convey messages on healthier living. Prevention matters in driving down the cost of health care.

[Abraham Tetenbaum]

In addition to the art therapy you cite, the arts have another role in preventative health care as a demonstrably effective means of providing youth with life-saving information and changing unhealthy behavior and attitudes. Enrichment Works, a Los Angeles nonprofit, has toured two 45-minute musicals dealing with the childhood obesity epidemic and produced a series of eight 10-minute plays for a hospital program aimed at preventing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Kaiser-Permanente has its own theater troupe for similar purposes. In negotiating for an improved health care system, let’s aim high and innovate, then negotiate and, when necessary, compromise. Your comment about asking your doctor, rather than arts organizations, is a misleading jibe, not the “death panel” big lie, I grant you, but misleading nonetheless.
--

[Barbara Ann Levy]

Firstly let me say that I am a contemporary Fine Art dealer (MFA in Painting and Drawing) and a licensed Creative Arts Therapist (MPS from Pratt in Art Therapy) I was taken aback by some of Christopher Knight's comments about Art Therapy. Art Therapy is a sophisticated integration of aesthetic theory and methodology married to Psychology. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association is a set of descriptions of the "phenomena" of mental illness. This same phenomena is understood by Art Therapists and can be seen in the marks made by patients in art therapy. Art made by patients whether mentally ill or not is the visual equivalent of the phenomena described by the DSM and can help diagnose mental illness. Art Therapy IS medical.

Unfortunately most people cannot get their minds around a field like Art Therapy because it combines what many see as the irrational (think woo woo artists) with the serious scientific study of behavior . Both can come together to create a potent recipe for patient change and for healing. The field of Art Therapy needs to be respected for its contributions to medicine instead of summarily dismissed.

[Donald Frazell]

CK never said that, and it is amazing I am defending him. Art therapy is useful, he said it very well could be, but has nothing to do with placing art in a room, especially when it annoys a patient. Therapy and for kids as a way to discover the world is great, but it is far from being creative art. Art Brut used it and came up with some great stuff, but seldom by the truly insane, though most artists are a little crazy, Cezanne made Van Gogh look downright ballanced. Bipolar is a common form in artists, Jaco Pastorius was perhoas the last musical genius and was totally nuts by the time he was beaten to death by a bouncer.

But there are many forms of art, not one. And placing what might irritate someone ina room is if not silly downright foolish. Let the patient decide, just as they would choose a TV or radio station.

For the other stuff, artist are jsut like other contractors, you dont work, you dont have insurance jsut like construction workers. There does need to be a minimal insurance base, for everyone, not specialized for artists. If you cant sell you jsut need to go get a job, there are hundreds of times the artists as are needed, the academies spew them out in droves beyond the markets need. I aint gonna pay for someone to sit on their ass and doodle. Not my problem, they need to reschool and get new skills and find work, just like everyone else. Artistes are no better, or worse, than anyone else. And deserve no favoritism.

art collegia delenda est
See you at the Braley next week CK

[Christopher Knight]

This is Christopher Knight, responding to Barbara Ann Levy. You incorrectly claim that I have "summarily dismissed" the contributions of art therapy to medicine.

Here is what I actually wrote, as you can read in the blog post above: "Clinical art therapy might be a perfectly legitimate, even beneficial medical specialty."

That's the opposite of summary dismissal.