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Goldilocks, Dad and Finding Care That’s Just Right

6 minutes of reading / 1 Comment / By /

My dad retired in the 1980s. In addition to his pension he had also earned health insurance coverage for the rest of his life. Over time, as you can imagine, the actual value of that insurance became more and more evident; In all likelihood, it was a many-years-of-life saver, because he lived until 2012. But then, I think his health insurance may have killed him, too. Dad retired early at the ripe old age of 60, because when he was 59, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His resulting surgery did not successfully remove all the cancer cells, so Dad […]

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8 Ways Your Advocacy Practice May Be Like The Giving Tree

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(Channeling the Plain White T’s here…) The book is a childhood classic, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. It tells the story of a tree that gives all it has to a boy as he grows from little boyhood to adulthood. From providing shade and a place to climb, to allowing the boy to sell the apples it yields, to finally letting the boy (now a man) cut it down to build a house, and then later build a boat out of it. In the end, when the tree has nothing left to give, “Boy” simply sits on the Giving Tree’s

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Enemies? No, But With an Important Distinction

5 minutes of reading / 2 Comments / By /

A recent email exchange with an APHA member highlighted a point we don’t make often enough, and one you need to embrace so you can discuss it with potential clients. The problem is – she used it to leap to an errant conclusion, one that demands clarity. In her email, she mentioned that she was considering joining a different professional organization, one that focuses on hospital advocacy, teaching hospital advocates how to do their jobs. She stated that the other organization “has multiple affiliations with those purported enemies of true patient advocacy, patient relations departments.” What? I was so taken

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Do Advocates Have a Duty to Report Dangerous Patients?

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Warning! This will be one of those posts you think back to from time to time, because the answers aren’t clear or easy, and the stakes are so high. A few weeks ago we all watched the news about 150 people who lost their lives as their plane crashed into the French Alps; a tragic loss of life which we learned later was caused by the co-pilot, who had intentionally crashed the plane – suicide by one – mass murder of 149 others. Horrible, tragic, and just so very, very sad. It’s easy, of course, to dismiss the young pilot

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Has Your Work Been Plagiarized?

3 minutes of reading / 3 Comments / By /

They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. While there may be some truth to that, there is no truth to the idea that plagiarism is a form of flattery at all. In my last post I shared with you my excitement at the advent of some new competition in the advocacy space, and gave you a list of six reasons why competition is a good thing, something to celebrate. But sometimes there’s a downside to competition, too. One such competitor to AdvoConnection, a new directory being set up in hopes of taking your money to match you

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Remembering the Mean Girls

6 minutes of reading / 4 Comments / By /

In Fall 2010, about 150 health advocates, many of whom were just considering entering the profession, convened in Washington DC for the Second Annual NAHAC Conference. I was there at the invitation of NAHAC, to both be a vendor, and to give a presentation about marketing for advocates. The conference was a resounding success in my estimation, using my two conference-success measuring sticks: 1. I met so many smart, wonderful, passionate people and 2. I learned so much more than I imparted. But there was one aspect to the conference that left a bad taste in my mouth, marring the

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Sorry. That’s Not Good Enough

7 minutes of reading / 2 Comments / By /

One of the most visible changes in the new health insurance reality are the medical bill surprises people are receiving that they never received before, for services covered previously as a matter of course. You know – whereas their insurance automatically approved a CT scan for purpose X in the past, now patients need pre-approval. Without that pre-approval, payment for that CT scan comes out of their own pockets – totally unexpected and usually very expensive. Most of us learn the hard way that we need to get permission for many of the services that used to be automatically approved.

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