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Let's Shake up the Health Care Industries (Opinion [1]

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Date: 2022-06-30

Free Use Stock Photo from Pexels. The person looks about as fed up as I feel.

Let's call our Insurance Providers,let's make our voices heard by pharmaceutical companies. How can we best do this?

Lately, it seems nothing happens in government without a long discussion about its economic implications. And it's no wonder, really, with increasing corporate lobbying power and economic turmoil many Americans are as worried about their pocketbooks as anything else these days. So, when it comes to the lost list of activism I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion about the role of Pharmaceutical and Insurance Companies in the fallout of the Roe V Wade decisions.

No use pretending that money isn't correlative to political power in the US or that corporate lobbying interests don't have impacts. It's how it is right now whether or not it should be. But it does give us a potential tool to make our voices heard.

How to best make our voices heard is the question? Can we vote with our dollars?

Can we call our insurance providers? Explain that the laws and lack of privacy are making us feel unsafe and we want to cancel our health insurance because the data that health insurance has made us more vulnerable than protected? Should we cancel our plans? That could leave people at risk. (And I don’t think we want this to be an excuse for insurance companies to raise premiums.)

Many insurance providers, Hospitals, etc. are explicitly religious organizations that are likely to support restrictive anti-abortion laws, we you change providers if that’s an option? Should we cancel non-emergency appointments at religious hospitals?

What about the incredible power of Pharmaceutical lobbying? Now that Roe V Wade has been overturned pharmaceutical companies can expect their margins to get cut even more as legislators take aim at contraceptives. Insurance companies will be on the line with costly procedures from the reckless new standards for how to treat ectopic pregnancies in anti-abortion states. Can we call every industry connected to healthcare and remind them that forced birth is costly. They may like patients, but they prefer patients who can pay. Can we call the executives and demand that they use the lobbying power that we already know they have in state legislatures to promote medically informed legislation, put pressure on state legislatures to not enact restrictive anti-abortion laws, or tone down existing legislation that is putting lives at risk?

Many companies have already taken action to help people get access to healthcare but at what point will people trying to use these services be arrested. At what point will these well-intended supports put people at greater risk? When will legislators cut any state funding these organizations came to depend on in retaliation? Placatory actions are not enough, we need to change the laws.

Not as a replacement for protests, citizen lobbying, and community organizing, but as a supplement to, let’s hassle every level of government and the healthcare industry for full bodily autonomy. Period.

What methods will be the most effective? That probably depends on a lot of circumstances and context but I’m VERY open to suggestions and I know there is much I don’t know. Please leave comments with suggestions for tangible activism. Or let me know what I’m missing?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/30/2107565/-Let-s-Shake-up-the-Health-Care-Industries-Opinion-Discussion-RvW

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