Get to know our Movement:

  • Our Story

    Who we are, what unites us, and why we feel called to fight for healthcare we can all count on

  • The Problem

    How the American health insurance industry is a the root of a broken healthcare system

  • Our Role

    How we fit into the big picture of healthcare advocacy in America

  • Our Strategy

    Our roadmap to ending the insurance industry’s practice of prioritizing it’s profits over our lives and winning care for all

  • Our Opportunity

    Why we are positioned for success

  • Join Us

    Learn about our plans for the upcoming months and how you can be a part of the movement to win CareForAll

Our Story

We are a group of Americans who have been let down over and over and over by healthcare in this country. We believe not only that we deserve better, but also that we can do better.

Our personal and professional relationships with this system are diverse, yet we share the experience of feeling frustrated, ignored, and abandoned by healthcare time and time again. This has united us in the belief that we cannot accept the status quo. We deserve better — for ourselves and our communities.

We envision a health system that we can all count on: one that has our back so that when our loved ones get sick, we can focus on their care without worrying about surprise bills or endless insurance calls. Across races, backgrounds, and zip codes, we all want to live in a country where we can trust that an unexpected hospital stay won’t bankrupt our families.

Right now, this vision is impossible to achieve because of a greedy few who prioritize profits over people, while most of us believe that it is wrong to profit off of people when they are sick. There is enormous power in the millions of us who want change and collectively, we can make this vision reality.

The Problem

American health insurance is a disaster. Fixing it is key to fixing the rest of our broken health system.

Our system is in crisis. In the richest country in the world, hospital bills are the #1 cause of bankruptcy and 59 million are uninsured or underinsured. Our system forces too many of us to choose between essential care and financial ruin. The fear of unexpected bills looms because health insurance doesn’t actually provide us the peace of mind it promises — we can’t count on it. Drastic change is needed, fast.

Described by health policy journalists as “the original sin that catalyzed … today’s medical-industrial complex”, health insurance is the root of exploitative, profit-driven healthcare. First, like any for-profit entity, insurers’ first responsibility is to shareholders — profits come before patients. Second, though Big Pharma and greedy hospitals are also for-profit, insurers are particularly egregious because they exist solely to extract profit — they don’t make anything or provide services. Finally, because laws limit insurers’ profits to a certain percentage of revenue, they are incentivized to inflate costs to maximize gains. This benefits a few greedy insurance executives, at our expense. Targeting health insurance, which orients the rest of our healthcare system toward profit, is the key to changing the whole system. 

Our Role

Our role is to fill the key gap in past & current health reform efforts: a mass movement for healthcare.

These problems are nothing new, nor are efforts to change them. Over the past century, half a dozen major pushes for national healthcare reform have focused on traditional organizing and advocacy. While these efforts yielded impactful changes like Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid, they fell short of addressing the full scale of the sector’s problems and some have resulted in little, if any, policy change.

Historically, major reforms pass most often when social movements continuously push for change, as seen with the Civil Rights Act, Clean Water Act, and Respect for Marriage Act. We’ve seen this in subsets of the health sector as well — disabled folks, people living with HIV, and people with psychiatric conditions have all won revolutionary change. Despite the entrenched interests of powerful institutions (e.g. Congress, the healthcare industry including insurers) in maintaining the status quo, they also rely on the people’s implicit support to function. Politicians need our votes and healthcare companies need our money and labor. When movements channel the will of the people, institutions and policies follow.

While today’s health reform ecosystem has strong players, gaps remain. Organizations focused on specific diseases or specific areas within the sector have seen success, but have not targeted the system as a whole. Academics and think tanks propose better systems, but effective pushes to turn these ideas into reality are rare. Groups of health workers have influenced hospital policy, but can’t scale beyond their profession-based membership. Medicare For All advocates have enlisted politicians but have not focused on mobilizing the public.

The absence of a social movement broadly targeting health is the key missing piece from numerous unsuccessful reform efforts over the past 100 years. Despite healthcare consistently polling as a top-three issue for voters and numerous efforts to win comprehensive legislation, reforms have repeatedly fallen short. Without activating and empowering fellow frustrated Americans who oppose the insurance industry and its allies, the status quo will persist — that changes with us, now.

Our Strategy

Our three-pronged strategy is an incisive roadmap to winning healthcare we can count on nationally.

With existing groups crafting health policy ideas, healing our democracy, and electing aligned candidates, the ecosystem’s biggest need is a political climate conducive to actually winning comprehensive change in healthcare. Given that many policy options can achieve our vision of affordable, accessible, and high-quality healthcare with people not profits at the center, and that considerable energy is already dedicated to debating the best option, the ecosystem doesn’t need another opinion. Instead, it needs a shift in the range of policy options that the public deems acceptable, so that passage of any of those aligned options becomes politically feasible.

Our grand strategic objective is to grow and sustain the political climate necessary to stop a health insurance industry that prioritizes its profits over our lives - and win healthcare we can all count on.

Winning national legislation is necessary because we not only need to end the for-profit insurance industry, but also build something to take its place. The scale of this change is so large that national legislation is the only tool big enough to achieve it. Our strategy focuses on dismantling three critical barriers to activating and sustaining support for national legislation:

1.     Reframe the debate: The national conversation on health is dominated by technical policy and jargon. This makes the debate impersonal and inaccessible, stopping many of us from engaging. Instead of joining the policy debate, we will shift it to a moral question — is it wrong to profit off people when they are sick? — to lower barriers to engagement and make our choice clear. Framed this way, most Americans will not only take our side, but also be more inclined to act.

2.     Build community power: Winning state and national reform requires sustained effort over many years. As we build this, we’ll develop local chapters. Our distributed leadership model will result in strong autonomous chapters, which will run campaigns focused on community needs – providing immediate relief and building trust that our movement can deliver. This will grow and sustain both the engagement and the campaign skills needed to win state and national reform. 

3.     Demonstrate change works: Whenever health reform is debated, industry fearmongering about wait times, physician choice, and ‘death panels’ erodes support. This waters down the final law to a half-measure that doesn’t address the full scale of our problems. We will win state and local reform that aligns with our vision to demonstrate that an alternative is not just possible, but preferable. Romneycare in Massachusetts paved the way for Obamacare to be seen as a safe – and better – option. Local demonstration projects assuage fears and move the public to our side.

Success in these strategies will shift the political realities and make national change a real possibility, setting the stage for a final campaign aimed at winning national legislation.

Our Opportunity

A majority of Americans already agree with us, positioning us for massive scale. Our organizing model incorporates lessons from the past and lets us harness that scale into sustained collective power.

Over the past 20 years, Gallup has consistently found that ~70% of Americans believe the US healthcare system is either “in crisis” or has “major problems.” The system is broken, and we all know it — we just have not been given an outlet to channel these frustrations into action. This abundant source of fellow supporters, ready to be activated, positions us for massive scale and will enable us to build a health movement of unprecedented size.

We have learned from past movements that it is hard to effectively capture this energy. We’ve embraced Momentum’s “hybrid” model — which combines the scale that mass protests reach and the structure and aligned strategy that traditional organizing excels at — which will allow us to build a movement of the scale, alignment, and sustainability needed to redefine the political possibilities in healthcare.

Join Us

In the next year, we begin building our movement and reframing the health debate in moral terms.

In the upcoming months, we’ll launch with a campaign on our moral frame and new member trainings.

  • By the end of launch, we will establish three chapters - perhaps placed strategically to influence sub-national races where healthcare is positioned to be a defining issue and our moral frame can shape the debate about candidate choice in the final months of campaign season. This will position us to bring on more chapters and influence more races in the 2026 midterms. Our campaigns team will own dreaming, sharpening, and implementing our final campaign strategy.

  • We will use op-eds, social media, and various in-person tactics to embed our moral frame in public discourse in healthcare in a few 2024 Congressional, gubernatorial, and/or mayoral races. Our goal is for our frame to be used in talk shows, broadcasted debates, and when we talk about healthcare with family and friends.

In the next 36 months, we will have an active network of 20+ chapters that has national and local wins:  

  • We will recenter the healthcare debate around our moral frame at both the kitchen table and on the news. Our frame will resonate so deeply that tens of thousands will be moved to action and we will be covered in all major media outlets. Our frame will serve as a litmus test in the 2026 midterms and will be publicly echoed by at least ten nationally-known candidates.

  • We will run local campaigns that win tangible improvements in material conditions. We will win support from a notable bloc of elected officials on at least five campaigns for state/local policies that reflect our vision. We’ll experiment and learn from successes and failures along the way.

  • We will become more skilled and will grow as a movement, as we will invest heavily in our chapters. Each will craft creative campaigns and nurture members’ organizing and leadership skills. Robust national volunteer teams will support chapters with training, strategy, and funds, and chapters will operate with the culture, structure, and practices to support members.

Success in the above will, in ten years, have led us to reshape the political climate in health policy and signify that we are ready for a national campaign, as over a million Americans will have joined one or more of our actions. We’ll have won at least three aligned state or local policies, and be in every city, every town hall.

We can’t achieve this vision alone – this is what we dream of, but we need you to make it happen! If you’re eager to channel your frustration and fear into action, there’s a place for you in the movement.

  • We’re recruiting a launch team! We need people with experience in grassroots and digital organizing, strategic messaging, campaigns, training, and fundraising. We need leaders who are excited to steer a team that will craft our launch campaign, develop our training program, and manage fundraising and operations.

  • We need action-oriented chapter founders who are excited to build power, grow leadership, and experiment with things and see what works.

  • We’re looking for advisors to provide essential guidance on narrative strategy, fundraising, national and state politics in health, and the operational nuances of launching mass movements.

  • We’re inviting funders – both small and large-dollar – to invest in the future that we all want. Every gift, no matter the size, signals that the people believe in and need our success.

Whilst we list some distinct roles above, we need anyone and everyone who is tired of feeling helpless as we are screwed over, who wants to try something new. We know that many of us who care deeply about this issue don’t consider ourselves ‘activists’ and might feel like we can’t contribute, because when we think of organizing, we think the only role is being in the front of a protest. But actually, there are so many roles needed in the movement that many of us do have skills for – can you plan a menu for a retreat? Make TikToks, create slides, steer a project, help someone think through a strategy, or write a blog? Then we need you! We will also be investing heavily in training and the growth of everyone who joins the movement, so come as you are.  We invite everyone to join our movement and share what we can to build the future we all want and need — we all have resources to share, whether they are human resources (skills, time, lived experiences, strategic insights, introductions, eagerness to learn) or financial resources (funds big and small). 

Do you want to feel empowered and part of a change? Do any of these roles feel within reach for you? Is there someone you can connect us with who might be a good fit? We’re changing the future of American health insurance. Join us.