Leukemia Survivor Andrew McMahon Glad for Health Care Bill

Posted on Apr 8th 2010 2:00PM by Steve Baltin
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As a cancer survivor, Andrew McMahon, aka Jack's Mannequin, has seen firsthand the importance of medical insurance. "I got lucky and I had two forms of insurance just by mere coincidence," he tells Spinner. " I was very blessed. But if I didn't even have that second form of insurance, me, who does pretty well, would have been sitting with a bill to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that would have been with full coverage on one insurance carrier."

It's a sobering thought that a young musician with insurance and a record contract with Warner Brothers could have faced a six-figure debt. For that reason, McMahon, whose struggles with Leukemia are documented in the critically lauded and obviously emotional DVD 'Dear Jack,' can't understand the battle over health care.

"The fact that this has become such a politicized fight, as opposed to something where the people that we hired and elected to go in and fight for us as individuals, that there is somehow this resistance to actually making a change is beyond me, just knowing what it looks like from the frontline," he says.

McMahon doesn't hold back his feelings for parties on either side of the issue. "I was so hopeful and so glad to see that we had a President that was willing to go in there and try and motivate people to make a change," he says. "On both sides, I just find it repulsive that our elected officials, instead of trying to make a change for our country for the better of its citizenry, they're actually doing their best to protect all of the lobbyists and all of these outside sources that are essentially crippling the industry to begin with."

Now that the bill has been passed, McMahon is cautiously optimistic. "Like many in favor of this legislation, I think there is a long way to go," he says. "Still, it gives me great hope to see that we as a country have taken the first steps towards caring for those who need it. I respect the opposition's hope that the free market would somehow solve this problem on its own, but I think we all know where that thought process has led in the past several decades."