All right, so I'm Liz Salmi and I am a person living with brain cancer in Sacramento, California.

Liz may sound kind of upbeat for someone living with brain cancer.

That's partly because she's got the hang of things. She's been living with

brain cancer for more than 10 years. And she's the kind of person who just likes a

good tough project, like she used to be in a punk band.

Riding around the country in a van, sleeping on people's floors, playing shows,

since her diagnosis could almost say dealing with cancer has been that kind of project.

A way to channel a lot of pissed off energy and connect with people. She's blocked by her treatment and she's really immersed herself in learning about medical stuff.

And all of that led to a new career for her.

So I had her do another take of her introduction.

So my name is Liz Salmi and I am a person living with brain cancer in Sacramento, California.

And today I work on a really cool research project called Open Notes and

Open Notes is all about encouraging clinicians and doctors to share the notes that

they write with the patients that they're caring for.

So as a medical consumer, Liz is pretty well informed.

But when she took that job a couple years ago, she had to learn something new. Health insurance. Until she took the job with

open notes, she had a kind of a health plan called an HMO, where one organization provides

all your care. And as long as you see only their doctors you

don't pay very much and she liked their doctors so you know that really worked for

her but open notes didn't offer that plan so she was going to need regular health insurance, more choices,

more confusion. And one expense she knew she would have, an MRI every six months to make

sure the cancer is not growing. On her old plan, the HMO, she paid 50 bucks for each

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