Out of Patients
with Matthew Zachary
Welcome to 2026: The Year of the Patient where the sick shall inherit the ballot.
Dear ASCO, With Love, From Your Favorite Pain in the Ass Cancer Advocate
After 20 years at ASCO, I’ve watched patient advocates graduate from picnic tables to a beautiful lounge. But has our influence grown with the furniture? A love letter to organized oncology, political power, and why patients need more than a seat at someone else’s table.
Everyone Has a Solution for Patients. Except Patients.
Everyone has a solution for patients. But who gives patients power? After 30 years in healthcare advocacy, I'm asking whether Americans share a political identity as patients, and whether that identity could become a constituency capable of changing the system itself.
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.
Charles Dickens Would Have Loved American Healthcare
Modern medicine can do things Charles Dickens could barely imagine. American healthcare then wraps those miracles in bureaucracy he would recognize immediately. Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, Scrooge, and Bleak House enter the patient portal.
Better Health Care Isn’t Charity. It’s Cheaper.
Patients aren’t the only ones paying for American healthcare dysfunction. Employers, hospitals, physicians and manufacturers lose billions to denials, prior authorization and administrative friction. Better healthcare may also be cheaper.
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 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.
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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