ABOUT US
We The Patients is a nationwide patient's rights movement led by those who are done being ignored. We do not ask for awareness. We demand accountability.
Cancer flips your life upside down and then drops you into a system that working by design to prioritize process over care. No one should face that alone.
Our legislative agenda begins with the Cancer Patient Protection Act, an unprecedented bill of rights to guarantee navigation, dignity, and financial protections from day one.
And the mission does not stop with cancer.
Through The Bloc we organize millions of patients, survivors, caregivers, and allies into a civic force that cannot be sidelined. From prior authorization abuses to hospital billing practices, we turn lived experience into pressure lawmakers cannot ignore.
We exist for one reason: enforce patient rights, hold power to account, and build a system that serves the people living through it.
OUR HISTORY
We the Patients began with a question no one could answer. Why has there never been a real Cancer Patients’ Rights Movement?
For decades, advocacy looked good in photos but left patients stranded in denials, bills, and bureaucracy.
Survival often depended on knowing the right person, not having the right to care. That is not a system. That is roulette.
The idea came from lived frustration. If ACT UP turned silence into power, if the Breast Cancer Wars made research urgent, if LIVESTRONG made survivorship visible, and if Stupid Cancer gave a generation its voice—then this moment demands the next step.
Not awareness. Not sympathy. Power—a national, bipartisan movement that turns over 19 million patients and survivors into an authoritative voter bloc.
We the Patients exists because America never gave cancer patients a Miranda warning.
No one should have to fight cancer and the system at the same time.
WHY NOW
America is in pain.
Patients and families are exhausted, angry, and pushed to the edge by a system that gaslights, bankrupts, and abandons them while calling it care.
The cost of survival keeps climbing, corporate malfeasance makes headlines every week, and trust in the system has collapsed.
Advocacy to date has been incremental: Hill Days, ribbon photos, polite panels in Washington. Symbolic victories without structural change. Nice to have, never enough.
The pressure has built too high to ignore.
Stories of abuse and denial pile up, and each one adds to a collective scream from a country sick of being sick and screwed. That energy must be organized before it fades.
This is the inflection point.
Patients vote. Survivors vote. Caregivers vote.
Harness that force, and healthcare stops being an untouchable lobby and starts answering to the people living and dying under it.