Episodes

"To quote my business partner, a broker makes you broker." To celebrate the 5-year and 250th-episode anniversary of the podcast, we recorded a special live panel in front of an audience featuring three of the most forward-thinking minds in the benefits space: Chris Hamilton (Hotchkiss Insurance), Taylor Rogers (CCIG), and Seth Denson (Acrisure). In this "State of the Union" episode, we tackle the existential crisis facing mid-market employers and the healthcare industry at large. The panel hol...

"If we can do it for Whole Foods, which is a very large organization, why can't we do this for other employers?" Is the era of relying on national, opaque "BUCA" networks finally coming to an end? My guests this week are Blake Allison, CEO of Employers Health Network (EHN), and Philip Eaves, from Ascension. Together, they break down the exact blueprint they used to build a direct-to-employer, high-performance network for Whole Foods - and how they are scaling that exact same model for self-fun...

"Employers are at a point where they want to help create that ideal healthcare system, not the one that they have been dictated to." Is your company's health plan actually keeping your employees healthy, or is it just waiting for them to get sick? My guest this week is Ben Miller, Chief Revenue Officer at Premise Health, the nation's largest direct healthcare provider operating over 850 onsite and near-site wellness centers. Ben joins the show to discuss why the traditional fee-for-service mod...

Welcome back to Last Month in Healthcare! This month, Spencer and Nathaniel sit down without a guest to unpack the biggest healthcare headlines and regulatory shifts from April 2026. From state-level crackdowns on PBMs to a surprising loophole that allows urban hospitals to siphon rural hospital aid, the guys dissect the policy changes and market moves that are actively reshaping the industry. They also discuss the affordability crisis driving a 26% surge in ACA Bronze plan enrollment, Amazon's...

"I would rather take this risk because I will never give another dime to a fully-insured carrier as long as I live." In an era of double-digit medical trend and skyrocketing fully-insured renewals, is the traditional insurance broker obsolete? This week, my guest is John Kountz, a benefits consultant at Frost Insurance who believes that the days of the "renewal carousel" - shopping the big 4 carriers and accepting double-digit increases every year - are finally over. In this episode, John shar...

"I'm going to leave the ladder, I'm going to leave the window open, I'm going to leave the lights on." This week on the podcast, I am joined by Rob Gelb, CEO of Vālenz. Rob has led Vālenz through an era of explosive growth, transforming the company from a 60-person shop in 2018 into a 550-employee powerhouse driving innovation in the self-funded healthcare space. But this episode isn't just about healthcare - it’s about leadership, vulnerability, and knowing when to pass the torch. In a surpr...

"We are not going after the high. What we're going for is symptom relief. Based on our research, employers are going to be saving $5,000 per participant per year." Is it time for employers to start covering medical cannabis? My guest this week is Emily Fisher, Founder of LeafWell. As a stage 4 breast cancer patient, Emily experienced firsthand the therapeutic benefits of cannabis when traditional opioid painkillers failed her. However, she also experienced the frustration of navigating the dis...

"Revolutions are never won by the ruling class... if you want to fix healthcare, you have to be willing to accept a negative sum game. Someone is losing." Why are self-funded employers still paying for healthcare on a "fee-for-service" basis, where every single transaction is billed separately with zero guarantee of a positive outcome? My guests this week are Francois and Jeremy from XO Health, a new type of health plan built explicitly for self-funded employers. Instead of relying on traditio...

"I can't fathom a world where employers are expected to budget and create a plan for their future without understanding what the costs of their healthcare are. Everything needs to be grounded in fact and truth." Is the traditional insurance network obsolete? My guest this week is Amy Wykoff, Chief Product Officer at Nomi Health. After starting her career building foundational AI models at IBM Watson, Amy pivoted to healthcare with a massive new challenge: rebuilding the insurance network from ...

"There’s no bad risk, there’s just mispriced risk... we helped one carrier achieve a 29.1% improvement in their loss ratio just through better risk selection." How do stop-loss carriers and self-funded employers accurately predict which groups are going to run well and which ones are about to see skyrocketing claims? My guest this week is Ali Panjwani, Founder and CEO of Merit Medicine. Ali transitioned from a career in biotech and pharmaceutical public policy, where he helped price and launch...

If you'd like your question answered on next month's episode, call/text 469-213-6381 and leave us a voicemail/text.Each month on Last Month In Healthcare, producer Nathaniel joins me to discuss the previous month's podcasts, headlines, and listener-submitted questions.This month, we're joined by Jeff Bak from Imagine360!Together, we react to the latest headlines from March, including the new CMS rule enforcing actual dollar amounts in hospital price transparency files. We also discuss Medicare e...

"We are in a $5 trillion US healthcare consumer market with no consumer in it... I basically decided we had been surgically removed from the US healthcare system." My guest this week is Mark Galvin, a serial entrepreneur who successfully funded his own company's healthcare by pairing a $10,000 High Deductible Health Plan with a fully funded HSA and HRA - saving his company 32% and his employees 50%. When he realized that brokers, carriers, and even the state insurance department were financiall...

"I've got a patient in Washington state. He's traveling 100 miles every other week to receive an infusion. We moved this patient into the home and saved the plan $700,000 on this one patient...on gout treatment." Why are infusion drugs quietly destroying your health plan's budget? This week, my guest is Rob LaHayne, Co-Founder of Leap Health. We pull back the curtain on one of the most overlooked and expensive categories in healthcare: Specialty Infusion Care. Because these drugs are administe...

If you'd like your question answered on next month's episode, call/text 469-213-6381 and leave us a voicemail/text.Each month on Last Month In Healthcare, producer Nathaniel joins me to discuss the previous month's headlines and listener-submitted questions.This month, we are officially in the new studio! Nathaniel and I react to the latest headlines from February, including the FTC's landmark settlement with Express Scripts over insulin pricing and the new bipartisan bill aimed at breaking up t...

"We don't view ourselves as a TPA, we view ourselves more as a platform... our goal is to simplify and reduce the barriers of entry into the TPA space." The role of the Third-Party Administrator is undergoing a massive evolution. No longer just a back-office claims processor, the modern TPA is being asked to serve as the high-tech, high-touch "nucleus" of the entire health plan. My guest this week is Vinny Esposito, CEO of Reflect Health (formerly S&S Health). Drawing on a decade of experience...

“Show me an incentive structure and I'll show you human behavior... until employers realize they have more power than they give themselves credit for, this can't continue." My guest this week is Norm Volsky, Managing Partner at DRI and Founder of MVP Growth Partners. Norm has spent the last decade as one of the top executive recruiters in the digital health and employer benefits space - placing the commercial teams that helped build unicorns like Livongo and Hinge Health. In this episode, Norm...

"Why are we paying $10,000 for a $30 drug?" My guest this week is Pramod John, a former Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who entered the healthcare space to tackle the largest economic problem in the country: skyrocketing healthcare costs. Pramod quickly realized that healthcare's dysfunction is actually not a technology problem - it is a deeply ingrained problem with economic incentives. In this episode, we dive into the murky waters of Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) and why the traditional...

"My wife would come back to check on me late at night, asleep at the keyboard, and she would be like, 'Is he dead?' The burnout, what we call moral injury, is more real than anybody knows." - Will Steelman The American healthcare system is crushing its doctors. Faced with "assembly line" quotas of 25+ patients a day, hours of unpaid administrative work ("pajama time"), and a suicide rate higher than that of veterans, physicians are fleeing the profession in droves. My guest this week is Dr. Wi...

If you'd like your question answered on next month's episode, call/text 469-213-6381 and leave us a voicemail/text.Each month on Last Month In Healthcare, producer Nathaniel joins me to discuss the previous month's podcasts, headlines, and listener-submitted questions.This month, we’re joined by John Kountz from Frost Insurance! We react to the record-breaking lobbying spend by drugmakers in 2025 and discuss the historic slump in Hospital M&A activity. We also cover the rising cost of medical re...

"If you ask the surgeon how much time they have to spend thinking about the business side of their practice, it's too high... Let's let doctors be doctors." - Ryan Wells My guest this week is Ryan Wells, Founder and CEO of Health Here. Ryan joins me to explain why the key to fixing the broken doctor-patient relationship is getting providers out of the debt collection business. We explore how Episodic Care (bundled payments) can finally align the financial incentives of self-funded employers an...

"If financial services and healthcare are 10 years behind everybody else from a technology adoption standpoint, insurance distribution is usually 10 years behind that." - Will Johnson My guest this week is Will Johnson, Founder and CEO of Gyde, who is building what he calls the first "AI-native" insurance brokerage. After spending a decade at Oscar Health, Will realized that while brokers are the critical "entry point to care," they are operating without the infrastructure needed to scale in th...

"I stopped doing what I didn't want to do anymore. It’s not hard to stop doing something you don't want to do... I didn't want to drink anymore." - Chris Leverett In this incredibly vulnerable and powerful episode, we step away from the usual technical discussions of self-funding and insurance captives to tackle a pervasive, often silent issue in our industry: addiction and sobriety. My guest is Chris Leverett, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Employee Benefits at TexCap Insur...

"Imagine getting a real-time snapshot of your health just by looking into your phone’s camera for 30 seconds." - Simon My guests this week are Simon Spurr, Founder of VivaScore, and Chris Burns, a veteran benefits advisor with over 40 years of experience at firms like Mercer and Sequoia. They join the show to demonstrate a piece of technology that feels like science fiction but is actually here today: rPPG (Remote Photoplethysmography). We discuss how this technology turns a standard smartphon...

"I asked him, 'What is it that you're teaching undergraduate students about benefits?’’…Just two slides. That blew me away." - Kyle Minick My guest this week is Kyle Minick, Vice President of Employee Benefits at Summit Financial Group. Kyle returns to the show to expose a massive systemic failure: Universities are not teaching HR professionals how to manage their second-largest expense. Kyle shares the shocking story of how he discovered that major university HR programs dedicate almost zero ...