After 30 years in patient advocacy, I seem to have wandered into healthcare policy. A conversation with Chuck Melendi about insurance, incentives, political power, and what happens when patients stop merely navigating the system and start organizing to change it.

Every major source of patient data in this country is compromised by whoever paid for it. The We The Patients National Patient Perspectives Poll changes that. 5 minutes. Anonymous. The data belongs to patients, not institutions.

ASCO 2026 delivered extraordinary advances in cancer research, including a standing ovation for a pancreatic cancer breakthrough. Yet the dominant conversation centered on something else: the widening gap between scientific innovation and patients’ ability to access it.