OPEN LETTER

Why Do We Need Radical Patients?

More than any other constituent in the healthcare ecosystem, we consumers have the power to change the future. But do we really know what we want, and what is good for us?

This website is dedicated to all those who want something different, something better or something more from healthcare, specifically, healthcare in the United States. It is for the Radical Patient in each of us.

People in America are getting heavier, sicker, older, and poorer. We have mental health and/or behavioral needs that often go unmet. We aren’t — as a population — in good health as compared to our counterparts in countries that are neither wealthier nor more scientifically or technologically advanced. And children are impacted even more than their elders; they are growing up in a system that deprives many of the conditions they need to grow up healthy and safe. They are thereby systematically robbed of their future, and therefore so are we all.

Yet we are breaking the bank to sustain this state of affairs. U.S. consumers, or patients, as they are known in the medical world, are spending inordinate amounts of money on a healthcare system that does not meet their needs and is not designed to serve them well.

The doctors who treat them are, for the most part, impacted just as negatively. Many are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. Burnout rates are high. Physician suicide is up. Smaller practices struggle to compete against larger integrated medical systems and work/life balance isn’t great. Doctors complain that they can’t spend enough time with their patients and still make ends meet, or meet the demands of their employers, whether those be medical systems, medical groups or hospitals.

Experienced practitioners who are licensed as other than — or at levels below — M.D., including but not limited to nurse practitioners, often aren’t empowered to treat patients they could be helping. And there aren’t enough primary care physicians to go around.

In short, there is no better time to remake healthcare for those that use and practice it, and to look for new possibilities in places we haven’t.

But nothing will happen if consumers don’t wake up. 

More than any other constituent in the healthcare ecosystem, we consumers have the power to change the future. But do we really know what we want, and what is good for us?