“The American healthcare system is broken,” the creators of the O+ Festival believe.
O+ (as in, O-Positive) is the brainchild of a group of local artists, doctors, and a dentist from Kingston, New York, who, in 2010, gathered around a simple idea: “Bring a band to town in exchange for dental work.”
In the 15 years since, the group has hosted an annual festival in the communal upstate city to support indie musicians, organize Narcan and CPR trainings, host local health expos, offer cycling events, and most importantly: provide no-cost medical care.
Because U.S. health care is so inaccessible — especially for self-employed touring musicians who have to pay for their own private insurance plans — the founders of O+ decided to try a different approach: a trade model.
In 2023, they founded a year-round, no-cost, exchange-based medical clinic for artists and musicians.
“Visiting and volunteer healthcare practitioners provide their skills because they believe in building an alternative model of preventative and wellness care for our community, one that values the individual and their contributions to the collective,” the organization’s website explains.
“In exchange for these services, artists provide free tickets to live performances, create new public artworks, offer free art or music classes, and contribute other valuable skills or services to the Kingston community.”
This approach places value on the labor and expertise of health care providers and artists alike, maintaining that everything from checkups and dentistry to massages and group therapy are free.
Well, they’re free from cash payments and medical debt. The O+ Exchange Clinic is built on the direct exchange of services.
“This goes back to, ‘Hey, doc, my tooth hurts; here’s a chicken,’” O+ executive director Joe Concra told the New York Times back in 2013.
From the start, Concra and his team have called this approach “an exchange of the art of medicine for the medicine of art,” sharing that they believe artists are “essential contributors to individual and collective wellness.”
“There’s just something being created here that makes me feel like we’re going to be OK,” Jesse Scherer, the O+ Kingston clinic coordinator, shares on the organization’s website. “We’re going to take care of each other.”
Per a recent O+ report, 47% of its alumni artists — whether musical acts, healing arts experts, or muralists that share their work at the annual festival — are underinsured or have no insurance at all.
That makes it all the more impressive that 6,135 clinic treatments and 1,554 dental treatments have been received by participating artists since 2010.
“The way you change a system nationally is you do thousands of local things, and eventually the system evolves,” Concra told the Guardian. “Every time I walk into the clinic, I think: ‘Oh yeah, it is possible to build a new system.’ I refuse to believe we can’t. So, we keep doing it.”
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A version of this article was originally published in The 2024 Music Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image by Thirdman via Pexels
