Healthcare as a Social Activity
Thank you, Elizabeth Rosenthal for An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back.
It is a sobering and useful breakdown of what has happened with our healthcare industry in the last several decades. I so appreciate your helpful and insightful outline for how we can ‘take back’ this for-profit machine and put human healthcare and cost-savings into action.
As a progressive psychotherapist practicing a group therapy approach called Social Therapy, we work outside of the medical/insurance/ healthcare industry as independent collaborators with clients and communities. I work to help clients exercise our collective power to live a more humane, less alienated life together. From that perspective, I wonder what you think about an added recommendation to how to take back our healthcare: Do our healthcare socially, collectively, in teams, in partnership with our support networks. I often invite clients to take a friend to a medical appointment, have a friend on hand when doing the fun activity of calling an insurance company to clarify a bill or ask for coverage, and have a support ‘health team’ when admitted to a hospital to help navigate medical care, billing, treatment direction. It seems to me our collective power needs to be exercised against the monstrosity of big business industries, and especially so when it comes to a vulnerable area of life called our health care.
Jennifer Bullock is the Director of Independent Pennsylvanians and a social therapist in Philadelphia.
*Reminder*
Conference Call with Elisabeth Rosenthal
Author of American Sickness
Sunday, December 2nd at 7 pm EST
Call: 641-715-3605
Pass code: 767775#
Good, Jennifer.