Donations spotlight: Help Health Care Voices make U.S. health care work better for all

Note from the CREDO Mobile team: This August, Health Care Voices is among three amazing groups that will receive a share of our monthly grant. Funding from the CREDO community will support Health Care Voices to advocate for affordable comprehensive health care and make our health care system work better for all Americans.

 Read this important blog post about Health Care Voices’ critical work, then visit CREDODonations.com and cast your vote to help send funding to the group to assist its efforts—and the efforts of our other outstanding August grantees.

In 2017, Laura Packard, a stage 4 cancer patient, stood up at a town hall held by Dean Heller, Nevada’s conservative U.S. senator, and challenged him on his support for repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “Why do you not care about the lives of thousands of Nevadans and millions of Americans?” she asked. “Why are you voting for me to lose my health coverage? Without it, I will die.”

Packard was kicked out of the event after asking the question but she went on to form Health Care Voices to help other health care activists and people living with serious medical conditions make their voices heard in health policy debates. This is a huge population:

• One in four adults in the U.S. has some type of disability and more than 135 million Americans have preexisting conditions.
• In 2022, 26 million Americans were uninsured. That’s 7.9% of the population. Many struggle with disabilities and serious medical conditions.
• More than 40 million Americans are underinsured and their high out-of-pocket costs mean they can’t afford the health care they may need.

The tens of millions of us with disabilities and preexisting conditions should have a voice in health care policy debates. But you know what always happens. Industry groups with huge lobbying budgets prevail and ordinary people have to struggle to be heard. Many disease-specific and condition-specific advocacy groups are funded by Big Pharma, which restrains their advocacy on affordable drugs, or by Big Insurance, which restrains their advocacy on insurance reform.

Health Care Voices gives patients and activists a voice in health care reform. We train and lift up grassroots advocates to get maximum impact with their own health care stories, becoming trusted media sources, reaching people in their own communities and influencing policymakers. Too often, decisions are made on our care without involving people who will be directly affected. Our free media trainings help diversify that public debate.

Our large-scale online media trainings are available for anyone to watch, an evergreen resource for people across the progressive movement. The resources we offer for free would cost tens of thousands of dollars as a paid media training and that’s out of reach for most small nonprofits or individuals. See our past public media trainings, including topics like how to write a letter to the editor, testify to your legislature and talk to a reporter, here.

Health Care Voices has also organized around state-level and federal-level bills, urging lawmakers to make new laws that strengthen patient rights and the health care system.

This year, our successes include working with the Protect Our Care Illinois coalition to rein in insurance companies by passing the Healthcare Protection Act. The Healthcare Protection Act puts Illinois patients first by ending junk insurance, banning step therapy—a process by insurers override your doctor’s choice of medications and force you to try other medications first—banning prior authorization for crisis mental health care—so you can get help right away, rather than fight with your insurance company first—improving network adequacy—no more provider lists of doctors who don’t take your insurance or don’t even exist—and ending unchecked rate increases for large group insurance companies.

We’re currently working with Pennsylvania Health Access Network on two bills to stop large hospital systems in Pennsylvania from driving up health care costs. HB 2344 will create a process for monitoring hospital acquisitions and closures that takes community members’ voices into account and protects local communities’ access to care. HB 2339 will give Pennsylvanians more information when they seek medical care by requiring hospitals to publish their prices and notify patients in advance of facility fees.

That’s not all we do. Care Talk, our call-in streaming show and podcast, offers expert advice to educate viewers on how to personally navigate the U.S. health care and health insurance system and deepen their understanding of the structural forces at work that keep Americans from getting care. We plan to relaunch Care Talk this fall to keep our audience up to date on threats to health care access and opportunities to improve it.

By training and informing people who are already navigating the U.S. health care system through serious medical conditions, we help build a movement of grassroots advocates ready to respond to threats to existing health care protections and to lobby for improvements to the system.

Together we’re making health care more affordable and more accessible to Americans than ever before and working toward health care for all.

This month, you can vote to help CREDO Mobile distribute a portion of its monthly grant to Health Care Voices and help our work with health care activists around the country.

Learn more about the vital work of HCV at HealthCareVoices.org.