This is where regulations can step in, to require email providers to accept mail from essential service providers.

I will pass on that, no one should be required to accept messages from anyone

How about "required to not mark as spam"?

I am not a fan of regulation in general

But SPAM should be resolved with strict adherence to standards like SPF, DKIM, etc. and where those fail it should be improved

Today many companies, large and small, as well as government agencies, large and small do SPF and DKIM very very very wrong.

Unless we can get this right I fail to see how regulations would do anything other than make things worse

Some of the biggest SPAM abusers are not the small providers but the Large companies like Gmail and Microsoft who do not vet their customers very well

If they are refusing messages, there's no need to bother marking them as spam.

Ah yes, I can see how this even worse situation could easily happen trying to "fix" the previous one...