Patient or Pawn?

We watched as a pandemic put America’s health care system to the test. But the perfect storm of health care is yet to come. For decades, policy makers and health care's stakeholders have ignored 1) America's inevitable aging demographics, 2) the troubling spread of chronic medical conditions in all age groups and 3) the mass exodus of health care professionals. Health care's leaders still have no plans to address the crisis of access that's triggered by this perfect storm of health care. In Patient or Pawn? you’ll learn the disturbing history of their epic fails, the indisputable realities that are already evident and the critical self-preservation strategies you need now to protect your rights to informed consent, autonomy and safety.

Here are just a few of the health care system failures you'll learn about in Patient or Pawn?:

* The federal Commission mandated to study health care worker shortages--it has never met.

* HHS's claim that we'll have a surplus of 600,000+ health care professionals by 2030.

* The loss of an estimated 300,000 lives every year from preventable medical errors.

* Recurrent security breaches already exposing 266 million electronic health records.

It’s not surprising there’s an unprecedented Elder Boom 70 years after an historic Baby Boom.

Demography is destiny.

* By 2030, there will be 17 million more seniors than today.

* Forty-two percent of all adults have two or more chronic conditions.

* By 2035, half of today’s health care workers will have retired.

To preserve your rights to consent, autonomy and safety, you will need strategies for self-preservation. Patient or Pawn? includes straightforward action steps enabling you to:

* Act as an empowered advocate for yourself or someone else.

* Recognize, anticipate and avoid harmful medical errors.

* Be aware of the benefits and hazards of health care technology.

* Achieve the best health outcomes by being medication-savvy.

When Jo began to write Patient or Pawn?, her mission was simple. First, to explore and unveil the demographics of aging and chronic illness that threaten our rights to consent, autonomy and safety. And second, to share the health literacy strategies needed for self-preservation. More than 500 scholarly and statistical resources later, that's exactly what she has done.

Patient or pawn? isn't a fix for America's health care system.

It’s a strategy for self-preservation in a perfect storm.

The choice is yours. The time is now. Patient or pawn?

About the author:

Jo Kline is an attorney, an expert on health literacy and a tireless advocate for patients' rights. She is also a Baby Boomer. Like many of her followers and readers, she became interested in the issue of medical decision making after witnessing a loved one's end of life. Soon after, while serving as volunteer chair of Iowa's largest hospice, Jo began to research, speak and write about the crucial role of advocacy in health care decision making. That was over 20 years ago. Much later, it was Jo's own medical crisis that taught her what it means to be truly health literate, and that led her to recognize the perfect storm threatening access to and delivery of health care in America.

Jo is also the author of The Practical Guide to Health Care Advance Directives, The 60-Minute Guide to Health Literacy and the award-winning SO GROWS THE TREE – Creating an Ethical Will. Among other print, online and broadcast media, she has been featured in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Des Moines Register. Jo is a contributor to online news outlets, a frequent guest essayist for The Des Moines Register and the author of its ten-week series Health Literacy 101.