Every Patient's Advocate

Catching Up – You Bet Your Life!

I have been remiss… not posting for two months… and plead the fact that there just are not enough hours in the day! Of course, I’ve kept up with blog posts at About.com - all the commentary about healthcare reform, new hiccups in the system we patients must deal with and more. But yes, this, my personal blog, has been neglected. Apologies.

One of the things that has been keeping me busiest (as you can imagine) is talks about my book, book signings and interviews. It’s been fun so far! So I thought I’d share some links to videos, podcasts and more.

• I had fun talking to Dave Bullard from our local NPR station, WRVO about You Bet Your Life! You can listen to the podcast here. You’re welcome to listen to the entire conversation!  But if you want to hear just the section about You Bet Your Life, then you’ll find it begins right at 33 minutes and runs a total of 5 minutes.

• My chat with Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau for her syndicated weekend radio show was a blast, too!  We were able to cover quite a bit more ground than my conversation with Dave — I thank Kathleen for her enthusiasm about You Bet Your Life! Please do listen to this podcast because it will give you quite a bit of perspective about why you must take control of your own healthcare.

Great fun at book signings, too:

• At Creekside Books in Skaneateles, NY – great questions from the audience and many thanks to both the owner, Erika Davis and Laura Ponticello from Laura’s List of Books for Women.  They made my book launch just perfect!

• A big thanks to Marie Kulikowsky from Barnes & Noble in Dewitt, NY for handling what will be two book signings!  Yes — in an example of some of the most marvelous timing, the Syracuse Orange NCAA basketball game was scheduled for the exact hour as my book signing (hey!  I got there first!)  I emailed those on my list and told them we would reschedule the basketball game.  Afterall, I have a pretty good sense of what my friends’ priorities are — however — about two dozen people showed up anyway – including friends Leslie Rose McDonald and Cindy Masingill — here are the three of us:

….. and yes…. we have rescheduled for May 6th, 7 PM at Barnes & Nobel, Dewitt.

• Thoroughly enjoyed meeting so many people and answering so many great questions at the University of South Florida / Sarasota Lifelong Learning, too.  Truly engaged emPatients — a real pleasure.

• Finally — but certainly not least! — is a great article written by Amber Smith of the Syracuse Post Standard (yes, my disclaimer, Amber is my editor) — accompanied by a video, too!  Link to the article — or to the video below:

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So at least you know I haven’t been snoozing…. I do want to sell books, but honestly, I’m making next to nothing on those books. More than that, I want you to be an emPatient, too… it’s important. Especially knowing the road healthcare reform will take us down.

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The New Healthcare Reform – Is Patient Reform

While Congress continues its monkey shines, American patients are continuing to get substandard, too-expensive healthcare, or no healthcare at all.  We are getting sicker, and dying, because we can’t get decent care.

However, if you think this post is going to be a call to action for Congress – think again.  While I am a firm believer in healthcare reform, and while I firmly believe we Americans deserve universal care – I also know that if you are already sick, or if you get sick today or tomorrow, or even next year, then healthcare reform isn’t going to help you anyway.

The one BIG benefit to all this healthcare legislative brouhaha, no matter what the outcome so far, is that it has forced us patients to realize that Marcus Welby has left the building.  The paternalistic, omnipotent doctor-as-God who actually cared about our medical outcomes has become an endangered species — one most of us will never meet in our lifetimes. Healthcare reform discussions have made this very clear:  American healthcare is not about health or care.  It’s about sickness and money.

So what have we learned?

That in order to get the good, decent care we patients deserve, we’re going to have to take matters into our own hands. Yes — US.  WE PATIENTS are going to have to do it for ourselves. We need to be EMPATIENTS (empowered patients.)  It’s a shift in mindset that those among us who are smarter and more attentive are realizing isn’t a choice.  If we want decent medical care in the United States (or, it seems, in most countries of the world) — we must make this shift in our thinking.

I hear people poo-pooing the use of the term “empowered.”  They don’t like it because to them, it suggests that someone must GIVE us power.

I don’t see it that way.  I see “empowered” as something we take on ourselves.  We take command of our care.  We take responsibility for acquiring the information we need, then making decisions for ourselves. We do that with a variety of resources, including physicians, other patients, and media information sources like the Internet, libaries and others.

If you think about it — that’s an entirely different way of accessing healthcare than most of us are used to.  It says that, in effect, we will no longer allow healthcare to be done TO us or FOR us.  Instead we will demand it be done WITH us.

That means it’s a whole new type of healthcare reform.
In fact, it’s PATIENT REFORM.

Are you ready to take up that cause for yourself and your loved ones?  There’s no argument over money here… it’s simply a recognition that if we are going to get the health and medical care we want and deserve, we are going to have to make it happen ourselves. It’s an approach to getting the right diagnosis, the right treatment, staying safe, and making sure you don’t lose your health because you can’t afford to access care.  It’s collaborative, research based, and helps us advocate for ourselves.

Here are some places to begin:

•  What’s an Empowered Patient? (or anything at the About.com Patient Empowerment site.)

•  You Bet Your Life! The 10 Mistakes Every Patient Makes (How to Fix Them to Get the Health Care You Deserve)

•  E-Patients.net (e-patients and emPatients describe the same thing – e-patients does not mean you need to understand electronic media.)

•  The Society for Participatory Medicine

These resources link to the dozens of other resources you’ll need, too.

Yes — this is it.  The beginnings of PATIENT REFORM.  Let those in Congress, the ones who have cadillac healthcare plans and don’t really understand what the rest of us deal with continue their bickering and corporate *ss-covering.  Let them continue to kow-tow to special interests who are more about making sure they keep their corners of the healthcare money pie, with little or no regard for patient outcomes.

I declare 2010 to be the Year of the EmPatient! Empowered, participatory — finding far better outcomes than we ever could by depending on Congress or someone else to — maybe — help us out.

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The AMA, Healthcare Reform – And a Good Chuckle

Forwarded to me by a dear friend (thanks Dot!)… so I share it with you. Wish I could attribute it, but I have no idea where it came from. If you know, let me know, too. Credit where credit is due.

The American Medical Association Weighs in on Healthcare Reform

The Allergists voted to scratch it, but the Dermatologists advised
not to make any rash moves.

The Gastroenteritis had sort of a gut feeling about it,
but the Neurologists thought the Administration had a lot of
nerve.

The Obstetricians felt they were all laboring under a misconception.

Ophthalmologist considered the idea shortsighted.

Pathologists yelled, “Over my dead body!” while the Pediatricians
said, ‘Oh, Grow up!’

The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while
the Radiologists could see right through it.

Surgeons decided to wash their hands of the whole thing.

The Internists thought it was a bitter pill to swallow, and the
Plastic Surgeons said, “This puts a whole new face on the matter.”

The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists
were pissed off at the whole idea.

The Anesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and
the Cardiologists didn’t have the heart to say no.

In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision
up to the *ssholes in Washington.

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Do you have concerns about healthcare reform?  Have a rumor or concern you want clarified?  Pose it here and we’ll try to uncover the truth.

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Healthcare Reform: Which Comes First – Lives or Money?

As Congress continues to struggle with healthcare reform, I suggest that there is one way to look at it that might make the arguments simpler than they currently are.

I see only two points of view. No matter who you are or what your interest in reform is, you fall into one of these categories:

Lives First
(Then Money)

or

Money First
(Then Lives)

“Lives First” people understand that lives are more important than money.  Not that money isn’t also important.  It’s just that they believe that aspects such as no insurance denials for pre-existing conditions, or making sure rewards are in place for innovation, or assuring access for everyone (everyone must participate) or making sure there is focus on health outcomes improvement — are more important than how reform will initially be paid for.

“Money First” people understand that controlling costs and reining in spending are more important than worrying about who gets what kind of options for care or access.  They understand that yes, people die or get sicker (and more expensive) when they don’t have access, but that denying access to some means others can get better care. They tell the Lives First people that if money isn’t the first consideration, then it will mean rationing for all, as if that is something new. (A bogus argument, by the way, because rationing is already a part of our care.)

Some generalizations, although I realize there are exceptions:

The Lives First people are often people who have had their access challenged due to cost (or they have watched a friend or loved one who has desperately needed access and could not afford it.)  I’ve been there.  Although I had high deductible health insurance when I suffered my misdiagnosis, the co-pays were back breakers. I lost every penny I had in savings just trying to keep up — all for the privilege of proving the medical experts were wrong.

The Money First people are typically people who do have access, either because their employer subsidizes their health insurance or because they are already age 65 and older and have Medicare.  They see reform as something that will impinge on their income because it certainly won’t get in the way of THEIR access.  They don’t need to worry about other people’s lives.  They only need to worry about their money. (I have to wonder about the Medicare recipients who think money is more important – do they have this conversation with their children?)

Based on that description, which do you think I am?  There’s probably not much question in your mind — but this may surprise you: My husband and I have good healthcare coverage because he is retired from the Air Force and that gives us access to a government payment system for the rest of both our lives.  Healthcare reform will end up costing us more money than we pay now, there’s no doubt.  Based on my own generalizations, you might expect me to be a Money First person….

But of course, I am not.  I hear from too many of those people who don’t have access, who have bankrupted because of medical needs, who work up to four or five jobs just so they can buy into a high deductible, catastrophic plan, just like I had. They get sicker, or they lose a loved one, not because the care wasn’t available, but because they could not afford it, or because they were denied care since they had no insurance.

Don’t get me wrong.  I understand that money is an extremely important consideration in the debate. We need to be responsible about the money questions, and yes, I get the “don’t want to mortgage our children’s future” argument. I believe we need both points of view to hammer out the best approach.

But, if you are a Money First person, I ask you to consider that Lives First may be the more fiscally responsible approach.  If we build a new healthcare system that assures access, even if it’s quite expensive to begin with, then over the longer term, we will be “building” a healthier populous — one that won’t need as much of the same kind of expensive access we have today.  In the long run, the system will cost far less with healthier people who won’t have to go bankrupt just to get the care they need.

Ask yourself: What’s more important to you? And which profile is yours? I wonder if maybe you’ve even put yourself into the wrong category to begin with? Does this food for thought shift your thinking at all?

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Do you have concerns about healthcare reform?  Have a rumor or concern you want clarified?  Pose it here and we’ll try to uncover the truth.

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DISCUSS | EMPOWERMENT TIPS | NEWSLETTER | TWITTER

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