As a health system, we really should find a way to pay people with chronic illnesses for all the care management work they do on their own behalf.

In many ways, this is an extension of one of feminism's crucial insights regarding domestic care labor: uncompensated work done in the personal sphere is valuable to society and should be treated as such.

The work that people with chronic illnesses do navigating insurer restrictions, coordinating across multiple doctors, wrangling specialists and keeping track of prescriptions obviously benefits them - but it also saves the health care system a lot of money.

And the labor involved in doing so can take people out of the workforce or severely diminish their earnings capacity.

If there was some way to compensate people for their own care management work, it would make it a lot easier for a lot of people to do what they need to do.

I don't think it would "save money in the long run", because almost nothing related to chronic illness + disability does, really, but it would still be worth doing.

I wonder how you could quantify this... https://twitter.com/aneeman/status/1307539117174149120