Health Policy & Advocacy

American Muslim Health Professionals (AMHP) is a leading national public health nonprofit advocating for accessible, affordable, and equitable healthcare for all. AMHP’s advocacy platform serves to support all efforts that improve access to healthcare and provide education to Americans on healthcare issues and it also provides an opportunity for Muslim Health Professionals to participate in healthcare advocacy. AMHP views healthcare as a right since it is an essential component of preserving life, and the absence of it has repercussions on an individual and societal level.

As a society, Americans are lagging behind other developed countries in terms of life expectancy, maternal mortality, and diagnosis of chronic illness. This is despite the fact that the U.S. has the highest, almost double the per capita spending costs on healthcare compared to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. One of the contributing factors is the rising cost of healthcare in the U.S. which has been recognized as a barrier to healthcare access and is also one of the leading causes of bankruptcy in the U.S. One of the means of overcoming the cost barrier has been to ensure health insurance for all Americans. This is especially significant since the U.S. is the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare. We at AMHP, recognize the complexity of our healthcare system with multiple layers of cost drivers however, the fact remains that if every American has access to healthcare it will lead to better health outcomes and social well-being. Our mission is the commitment to a healthier community in the U.S. NOW and we recognize that the overall change process will require significant evolution over time.

To this end, AMHP has engaged in healthcare advocacy to support policies that improve the affordability and accessibility of healthcare for Americans. AMHP was one of the only Muslim public health organizations to ensure that Americans across the nation were aware of and connected to health insurance coverage provided under the ACA. AMHP was one of the only Muslim public health organizations to ensure that Americans across the nation were aware of and connected to health insurance coverage provided under the ACA. During the first four open enrollment cycles, AMHP hired community liaisons to coordinate local outreach and enrollment events in their community. Our “Connecting Americans to Coverage” program resulted in over 350 enrollment events and over 900 people enrolling in coverage between 2014 and 2017. We also developed resources and tools for other organizations to conduct enrollment in their local communities and our cumulative outreach from these efforts was an outreach to over half a million Americans and partnerships with over 80 organizations.

AMHP also joined other organizations on National Muslim Advocacy Days in 2018 and 2019 to advocate for relevant health policy issues. During the pandemic, AMHP has been leading the effort in the Policy Committee of National Muslim Task Force for COVID-19 to advocate for health policy solutions, including increased PPE and testing, Medicaid/Medicare expansion, supported quarantine, increasing SNAP benefits and other critical legislations proposed to ameliorate the current crisis.

AMHP is also committed to providing our members with a platform to engage in healthcare advocacy. For this reason, throughout our advocacy work for the pandemic we have done outreach to our members with Action Alerts and to obtain volunteers with healthcare backgrounds for our congressional and senate offices virtual meeting. To ensure that members are empowered to participate in healthcare advocacy independently or in conjunction with AMHP’s efforts, AMHP has created an Advocacy Toolkit and Khutbah Guide. AMHP has also partnered with Poligon to provide Congressional Outreach training sessions which is an educational series that is currently ongoing.

AMHP’s vision for advocacy is that it is a collaborative effort therefore as we engage our members and other Muslim organizations, we are also working with other public health and healthcare organizations to work towards shared goals of a healthier tomorrow.

Our board members also come from eclectic backgrounds ranging from healthcare, pharmaceuticals and public health. We believe that our mission is a shared value that brings us together to work for a higher cause and we also envision that this mission will resonate with our AMHP members regardless of backgrounds, and they will use the AMHP platform to work towards this shared mission.