Why a Cancer Patient Rights Lobby Could Reduce Moral Injury

In today’s healthcare system, cancer patients are crushed by prior authorizations, surprise billing, and endless administrative barriers that delay care and drain families of energy and resources. Physicians are caught in the same trap.

They enter medicine to practice at the highest level of their training, yet find themselves diverted into paperwork, insurance battles, and conversations that have nothing to do with science or healing. The result is a dual crisis: patients forced to fight a system while fighting their disease, and clinicians suffering unprecedented levels of moral injury. Everyone is waiting for the system to repair itself, but it never does. It is time for patients to organize.

We The Patients is building a cancer patient rights movement grounded in a simple principle: no one should be forced to fight cancer and bureaucracy at the same time. At the center of this work is the Cancer Patient Protection Act, which would guarantee every cancer patient an independent, certified navigator from the moment of diagnosis. The model is comparable to a public defender in the justice system.

A navigator exists solely to fight denials, explain options, reduce financial toxicity, and ensure that patients are not left to fend for themselves in a maze of fine print and false promises.

The immediate benefit is clear. Patients who have an advocate stay on treatment, avoid unnecessary complications, and experience fewer delays in care. They trust the system more, adhere more consistently, and feel less alone. What is less obvious, but equally vital, is the benefit to physicians.

When navigators take on the administrative fights, physicians recover time and space for medicine. Clinics become less chaotic. Patients arrive informed and prepared. Conversations return to clinical decision making rather than billing disputes. The daily conditions that fuel moral injury begin to recede.

Supporting a patient rights movement is therefore not an act of charity. It is an act of self-preservation for medicine itself. By organizing to protect patients, we are also protecting the integrity and well-being of physicians. That alignment is rare in healthcare policy, and it is why the medical community should view this movement not as an external demand but as a shared cause.