Patient Advocacy Movement Grows in Strength and Numbers

A JOINT LETTER TO THE LEGISLATURE

We are people who have spent our lives fighting for justice: for access to healthcare, housing, clean air and water, and economic stability for our communities.

As organizers, advocates, and community leaders from across New Mexico, rural and urban, we have fought shoulder-to-shoulder with communities of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, and working-class families. And in that work, we’ve learned one truth over and over again: the fight for safety, dignity, and health is also a fight against corporate greed. 

Whether we’re facing down insurance companies denying care, corporate polluters poisoning our water, the opiate industry creating an addiction crisis, discriminatory businesses ignoring civil rights laws, CEO’s marginalizing our workplaces or profit, or private housing companies pushing families out through exploitation—we know the harm caused when corporate profit is prioritized over people.

For these reasons, we are alarmed by the current efforts in New Mexico to shamelessly vilify trial lawyers and pass laws that let billion dollar corporations off the hook when they hurt our people. Trial lawyers represent everyday New Mexicans harmed by these corporations and institutions. We know that people of color, elders and women are disproportionately the victims of medical malpractice and we simply cannot stand by and let those doing the harm go unchecked. 

Right now, New Mexicans are being subjected to a well-resourced DISinformation campaign meant to turn us against each other instead of uniting to fight back against the real problem in healthcare: corporate greed. As New Mexicans and as people committed to the work of justice, we cannot idly stand by while this tactic goes on. 

New Mexico has long been targeted by extractive industries that profit from our needs and limited resources. Today, private equity is the latest extraction-buying up more hospitals here than anywhere else in the country, a model linked to higher patient harm, physician burnout, and community disinvestment.

Combine this with a national physician shortage - made worse in New Mexico by low wages, our rural makeup, and decades of failed policies that have underfunded schools and behavioral health services, creating quality-of-life challenges, making it harder to recruit and retain physicians than in other states. It is clear why our healthcare system is in crisis. 

Civil law has long served as the people’s law — the arena where individuals seek justice when harmed by police violence, where tenants hold landlords accountable for unsafe or unlawful conditions, where those whose civil rights have been violated pursue redress, and where pharmaceutical corporations were held liable for the devastating toll of the opioid crisis. 

Medical malpractice is no different. When a person is injured or wronged, they must have access to a legal system that enables them to pursue accountability, supported, as in so many pivotal social struggles before, by community organizations and trial attorneys prepared to stand alongside them in the face of powerful institutions. Proposals to limit accountability to taking the power away from juries and giving it to politicians to determine accountability to a corporation or insurance industry is not what New Mexicans want.  

We call on New Mexicans who share our values to demand real solutions to the healthcare crisis, and to reject the false choice between fixing healthcare and protecting people’s access to justice and holding corporations accountable. We call on our policy makers to stand in strong opposition to any attempt to erode the people's law under the guise of reform and instead continue the hard work of addressing systemic issues with systemic solutions. 

Respectfully signed, 

New Mexico Safety Over Profit

Indigenous Women Rising

Working Families Party

NM Native Vote

Equality New Mexico

Organizers in the Land of Enchantment