This may sound counterintuitive, but the best place to start a path to Universal Healthcare is with big companies.
Our biggest companies are really bad dealing with the economics of their healthcare benefits. They get ripped off. A lot. They are not functionally set up to address both cost and quality of outcomes.
They take on all the cost risk. But. They hire companies affiliated with huge HC conglomerates to manage it all for them.
Those conglomerates keep the huge companies as much in the dark about actual costs as they do the 20 person start up
I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to companies with tens and hundreds of thousands of lives who had no idea whether the price the company administering their medical benefits paid a hospital for a surgery and in patient stay, was the same price they billed the company. They have no idea at all.
In many cases, they only receive a weekly invoice for millions of dollars for their medical and pharmacy benefits and they have no idea if it accurately reflects their contract, or, if they got the best price , or if there is a spread and more
Some try to audit, but the claims data doesn’t incorporate the actual amount paid to the care provider. Nor does it have all the fields necessary. Or even worse, sometimes they only get their weekly invoice and don’t have full claims available to them
Still, despite this they “ trust” these big conglomerates to act as middlemen and rip them off.
Why don’t they switch ? This is the conundrum they find themselves in.
They have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and their families they cover. The law of big numbers say a lot of those folks are in very messy situations. They dont want to go through the pain, fear and uncertainty of moving from their current source of care. And the HR department knows the emotional switching cost of moving away from the incumbent is incredibly high. They don’t have enough people working in HR to deal with it.
Those same big companies rarely have more than one person acting as a “HealthCare CFO “, responsive for making sure all the pricing is accurate or negotiated.
And of course, no big company wants to admit they are getting ripped off. And none will violate their confidentiality clause of their contracts. I literally tell them to put a pdf of their HC contracts into their LLMs and just ask it “where am I getting ripped off “. Not perfect. But the list is always very long and eye opening
So what should they do. The word of the week is “Carve Out”.
These companies are big enough they can ask to Carve Out anything they want. I tell them to use their Carve Out to direct contract with transparent surgery centers and providers. Maybe just hop or knee replacements to start. Hopefully https://t.co/xY30tR9MWn too :)
This is the starting point
🚨DEMOCRATS DELIVER BIG RESULTS:
Illinois Governor Pritzker has just BALANCED the budget for the EIGHT consecutive time in his state.
It prioritizes affordability for working families without raising taxes on working people.
That includes $400 payments to Illinois families kicked off of SNAP by the Trump administration.
This is EXACTLY how Democrats should lead - in a way that centers the working class as the federal government strips resources and funding from states. This is HUGE.
FIONA HILL: Putin is starting to get very nervous about Russian society and perhaps elites.
His choices are shrinking, and we can see that picture has become darker for Putin.
On the front line, his army cannot advance, casualties are enormous and increasing.
The other thing is oil. Everyone was expecting that Russia would have benefited enormously from the increase in oil prices.
But in fact, sanctions that were imposed by Europeans and Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil have actually constrained those revenues.
Revenue isn't the same as having more manpower or more weaponry, and he cannot turn the innovation tide against Ukraine.
It's still costly for Putin to buy from abroad, from China, the components that he or the military needs for their weapons development.
Putin is still trying to get others to hand him Ukraine's capitulation because situation for him doesn't look great.
When Notre-Dame burned in 2019, the world stopped.
Today, Russia damages Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a monastery nearly 1,000 years old and older than Notre-Dame itself.
A thousand years of history deserves the same attention, the same sympathy, and the same protection.
Right now, as Russians continue to strike #Kyiv with over a dozen of ballistic missiles, the Dormition Cathedral of Kyiv‑Pechersk Lavra — a UNESCO World Heritage site and priceless cultural landmark — has been struck and is burning.
A brutal assault on our people and our heritage. This is the true face of Russia’s Orthodox values.
MAJOR BREAKING: In a now deleted post by former MMA fighter Daniel Cormier, he posted screenshots of Eric Trump trying to get an insider scoop on whether any of the MMA fights at the White House are rigged so that he could try and illegally make money off of them..
Below is the Direct Messages that Trump allegedly sent Cormier. There is no reason to doubt the legitimacy of these messages.
MAGA: Obama’s $1.7 billion to Iran to reduce uranium stockpile by 98% = TREASON.
MAGA when they find out 2026 proposal includes: $12B up front, $12B in 60 days, $300B reconstruction plan & conceding Hormuz to Iran & not addressing ballistic missiles or enriched uranium/nukes:
This is Trump’s Watergate.
Today, the @nytimes released a truly stunning report on the Epstein cover-up by the White House.
Collusion, breaking the law, evading subpoenas—it’s all in there:
- Trump quashing the files
- The VP, COS, DOJ, FBI, and others colluding in the Situation Room to stop their release and compliance
- Officials lying to the public
- Admin in-fighting and exits
- Officials who appeared in front of Congress during this time
Read the report here: https://t.co/prgyF2Isfg
Scientists at Trump’s EPA say they are being told to make chemical risks “disappear on paper.” Not to study or manage them, but to make them vanish.
When a safety test on a household chemical shows danger, supervisors reportedly ask to keep shrinking the scenario until the poison looks safe.
They have reassigned senior scientists to paperwork and handed life-and-death risk assessments to staff with less experience. They have installed former chemical industry lobbyists to run the very offices that are supposed to regulate the chemical industry.
A gift to industry, paid for with your family’s health.
They are even throwing out research on how certain chemicals hit certain communities harder, calling decades of established science “DEI.”
You can make risk disappear on paper.
The cancer does not disappear.
The birth defects do not disappear.
The infertility does not disappear.
The kids drinking the water and getting sick do not disappear.
The EPA exists to protect people, not to protect the profit margins of the people poisoning them.
Every American deserves to know what is happening. #TrumpMakesUsSick
https://t.co/5DwXgxBybt