We the Patients

"A fiery yet hopeful portrait of a broken system." - Publisher's Weekly   Take control of your healthcare and understand the rights that protect you. In America, it’s hard enough to stay healthy, but it’s doubly brutal when your care and your outcome hinge on one question: “What insurance do you have?” Thirty years after surviving a rare brain tumor and earning, what People magazine coined, “the people’s voice in healthcare,” Stupid Cancer founder Matthew Zachary learned how to bypass America’s convoluted healthcare system: Don’t fix the system. Rig it in your favor. We the Patients: Understanding, Surviving, and Navigating America’s Healthcare Nightmare shows you how to make the most of a convoluted system that’s built to confuse and exhaust the very people it claims to serve. This patient proclamation shows you how to stay truly alive even in the face of illness, make meaning from chaos, and channel anger into advocacy.  It covers: Zachary’s crash course in the American healthcare system after a life-threatening diagnosis at 21 and his mission to make it “suck less” for the next patient The rise of patient advocacy and the growing movement to reclaim power from a system built to serve itself The coming Fifth Healthcare Revolution, driven by a newly organized electorate, and what it means for every American We the Patients is an unfiltered look at what happens when the healthcare system fails real people. It’s a blueprint for fighting back, and a must-read for anyone navigating illness, caregiving, or just trying to stay human in a system that makes that harder and harder for us all.

Foreword xiii Preface xvii 1 We the Nightmare 1 2 We the Delayed and Denied 19 3 We the Survivors 45 4 We the Purpose- Seekers 65 5 We the Advocates 83 6 We the Consumers 103 7 We the Relentless 119 8 We the Organized 143 9 We the Patients 161 10 We the Revolution 175 About the Authors 181 Acknowledgments 183 Notes 187 Index 221