From Jay Lake’s*

If you are concerned about the high cost of health care, read the following: It is worth your attention…

This is an excerpt for Jay Lake’s blog. {Bolding by me and not the original author}

On Sunday, I said the following here on my blog:

A number of people have suggested that I should try to reframe my experiences for a political audience, both in terms of attempting to place op-eds in one or more major national newspapers, and in terms of writing to senators and congressional representatives. While healthcare isn’t really my core political hot button, it’s certainly the life I’m living now. And the absurdities of the system are profound in their manifest illogic and cruelty. Put simply, we optimize to prevent fraud and protect profits, and in the process punish patients for being ill. So I’m going to be working on that. If you have experience with healthcare activism, or contacts with major national media and political figures, please contact me with suggestions or experiences that might be helpful.

[ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

I got several very helpful responses. As a result, yesterday I drafted two PR/media pitches for my new effort. One was positioning my story as a one-shot opportunity for a guest column or a media piece. The other was positioning my story as a potential short run or open-ended series. This led to some interesting conversations with Lisa Costello, among other things on the subject of whether I could use the term “late life” to refer to my current situation, and where the boundary was between late life and end-of-life.

The pitches are off to a couple of knowledgeable people to review and critique. In mean time, here’s the current draft of the series pitch so you can see where I’m trying to go with this:

Jay Lake is a multiple award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy, and parent of a teenaged daughter, who is entering his fifth year of living with Stage IV metastatic colon cancer. Now considered incurable at age 48, he is grasping at the cutting edge of medicine with full genomic sequencing while at the same time navigating the waters of late-life and end-of-life healthcare and personal finance issues.

Almost a million dollars has already been spent keeping Lake alive this far. He’s outlived 92% of his cancer cohort. The combination of medicine at the frontiers of technology and navigating the byzantine world of health insurance, hospital billing and disability insurance can be emotionally and financially crippling.

This is a world every American is at risk of entering with a bad fall down the stairs, a cardiac event or a bout of cancer. An articulate, experienced communicator, Lake writes and speaks eloquently on an ongoing basis about the challenges and personal costs of seeking treatment when you’ve outlived the clinical flowcharts, and what it’s like to depend on the latest developments in science and technology to eke out one more year of life.

Read more about this here.