It Shouldn't Be This Way - Media Kit

For Immediate Release
Contact: Robert Kane, MD
Phone: 612-624-1185
Email: kanex001@umn.edu

Geriatric Expert’s New Book Helps Families Navigate Broken Health Care System
It Shouldn’t Be This Way Describes His Difficulties in Arranging Care for Ailing Mother

(Minneapolis, Minn.) – It Shouldn’t Be This Way, a new book by geriatric health care expert Robert L Kane, MD, uses elements of a memoir to describe how badly broken our health care system is today and what families can do to navigate the confusing world of hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities. The book recounts the difficulties Kane and his sister encountered when trying to arrange long-term care for their ailing mother. Despite all of his professional knowledge and personal contacts Kane was unable to get the system to perform the way it should. The book asks, “If an expert could not make the system work, what chance does the average person have?”

But the message in It Shouldn’t Be This Way is not all negative. Each book chapter ends with a set of formal lessons that are derived from their mother’s experience. These lessons are designed to help older adults and their family members – many times adult daughters - ask the right questions when working with the health care system. “Every adult will either enter a nursing home or have to deal with a parent or other relative who does,” Kane said. “Unfortunately, few people rehearse for this challenge and even fewer emerge unscathed from the frustrations and impediments when try to make the health care system work.”

Kane has also organized Professionals with Personal Experience in Chronic Care (PPECC), a group of health professionals who have faced similar challenges with the health care system. Now more than 600 members strong, these doctors, nurses and other health professionals hope to create a degree of outrage about how society has allowed health care to go on as it is. “We believe it is high time that we face up to the challenge of long-term care and determine how to fix it,” stated Kane.

Published by Vanderbilt University Press, It Shouldn’t Be This Way points to the travesty where Americans pay more than $200 billion annually for care that no one likes. While politicians argue about who should pay for long-term care, Kane says no one is asking about the value of what we are buying and whether or not it meets the expectations of older adults and their families. He poses several solutions so consumers will get better quality and value in the future.

About the Authors

Robert Kane, MD, an international expert on long-term care, learned more from this first hand experience than from all his research. He holds the Minnesota Endowed Chair in Long-term Care and Aging at the University of Minnesota and has written more than 30 books and 300 articles on the topic of aging and long-term care. Co-author Joan West, a schoolteacher in New York, is Dr. Kane’s sister; she took on the daily care burdens for their mother and provides comments from a layperson’s perspective. “My sister and I wrote this book to raise awareness so individuals will be better prepared to demand and receive the care they actually need,” explained Kane.