Out of Patients
with Matthew Zachary
Welcome to 2026: The Year of the Patient where the sick shall inherit the ballot.
The Resilience Playbook: Cancer, Congenital Chutzpah, And Why American Healthcare Is Exhausting Everybody
Thirty years after brain cancer changed his life, Matthew Zachary joins The Resilience Playbook to discuss resilience, American healthcare, employer benefits, and why building a national patient constituency might accomplish what decades of traditional advocacy haven't.
Prevention Is Being Prevented
Patients and healthcare innovators may be fighting opposite sides of the same locked door. What that reveals about access, incentives, advocacy and the case for patient political power.
America’s Newest Healthcare Industry Is Protecting Us From American Healthcare
American healthcare has spawned a multibillion-dollar navigation industry to help patients use the care they already pay for. Advocates solve real problems. The stranger question is why the system creates so much demand for them.
How Do You Create Demand for Something Nobody Wants?
For 20 years, I’ve built healthcare brands for markets nobody wants to need. From Stupid Cancer to We the Patients, I’ve learned that the hardest part isn’t creating demand. It’s giving people a way to recognize something that was already there.
Apparently I’m A Healthcare Policy Guy Now: My Appearance on Disruptive Dialogue with Chuck Melendi
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.
The Future Looked Strangely Familiar: A Love Letter To The CancerBuddy Mobile App
In 2014, we built “Match.com for cancer.” It eventually died. The idea didn’t. Twelve years later, a CancerBuddy retreat sent me looking back at 30 years of survivorship, community, failure, progress, and the shoulders we stand on.
RosettaFest 2026: I Didn’t Expect Employer-Sponsored Healthcare to Restore My Faith in American Healthcare
I went to RosettaFest expecting to give a keynote. I left with the Marshall Allen Award and a completely different understanding of employer-sponsored healthcare, patient advocacy, and why the companies we work for may be one of the most overlooked forces shaping American healthcare.
North Carolina Created a Healthcare Affordability Commission. Guess Who’s Not in the Room?
North Carolina created a healthcare affordability commission with hospitals, insurers, employers, and policy experts at the table, but no patients. If we are serious about fixing healthcare, the people who navigate it, pay for it, and depend on it must have actual power in the room.
The First Patient Poll That Actually Belongs to You, The Patient
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.
The Most Important Story at ASCO 2026 Wasn’t the Science
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.
Out of Patients?
Join the recurring Out of Patients dispatch from Matthew Zachary covering the latest American healthcare shenanigans. Essays, podcast episodes, media appearances, book updates, and live events delivered with a sardonic Gen X perspective from a patient who simply refuses to shut up.
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