For decades, unions in the arts, entertainment, and media industries have successfully fought to secure high-quality health coverage for the writers, directors, actors, musicians, technicians, broadcasters, and other artists and craftspeople whose work enriches American life. Through collective action, we have built strong health and welfare plans our members depend upon. These plans represent generations of sacrifice, solidarity, and negotiation, and they remain an essential benefit that our members have earned and deserve.
At the same time, our members are contending with the rising cost of health care, particularly because our industries are built around project-based and freelance employment, where eligibility for health coverage often depends on meeting minimum earnings or work-hour thresholds. During economic downturns, industry disruptions, or periods between productions, many dedicated artists and craftspeople can fall short of those thresholds through no fault of their own, leaving them and their families without health coverage when they need it most. Not surprisingly, our most vulnerable members are often the first to lose coverage.
Our members deserve the same guarantees that workers in other industrialized nations have: that getting sick will not mean financial ruin, and that a gap in employment will not mean a gap in care. Universal access to health care would ensure that all workers have basic protections, support the continued preservation of our industry health plans, and provide additional space for our unions to fight for better wages, safer workplaces, and improved working conditions.
We stand in support of AFL-CIO Resolution 10, adopted at the 2022 AFL-CIO Convention, which affirmed the goal of moving toward a federal single-payer system — like Medicare for All — that guarantees health care as a human right while retaining the critical role of industry health plans and without diminishing those hard-fought benefits.
The AEMI stands with our members and the entire labor movement in the difficult but necessary fight to guarantee health care as a human right for all. We call on Congress and the Administration to take meaningful steps toward universal health coverage.
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October 2026