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THCB Gang Episode 77, Jan 6 1pm PT – 4pm ET

After our Christmas break THCB Gang is back! Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang at 1pm PT 4pm ET Thursday for an hour of topical and sometime combative conversation on what’s happening in health care and beyond will be THCB regular writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard);  fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey);  futurist Ian Morrison (@seccurve) & patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson)

You can see the video below live at 1pm/4pm or it’s kept here for posterity. If you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels

Nate Maslak, CEO of Ribbon Health

Nate Maslak, CEO of Ribbon Health talked with me late last year (2021) after his $40m round from General Catalyst and Andreesen Horowitz. We dug into the really thorny problem of information about physicians. This has so many facets and ramifications but most people only see it when their doctor somehow isn’t in their health plan’s network. But it’s much, much more than that. Nate joined me in nerding out on this topic and explaining how Ribbon is working to fix it — Matthew Holt

#Healthin2Point00, Episode 246| Healthcare.com, Found, Well, Gamer Health, Belong Health

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Let’s break Jess’s New Year’s Resolutions a tiny bit and look at some 2021 healthcare deal holdovers. Healthcare.com raises $180 million, bringing their total to $212 million; Found raises $100 million, bringing their total to 132 million; Well raises $70 million, bringing their total to 135 million, and Garner Health raises $45 million, bringing their total to $70 million.

-Matthew Holt

Simple Bills are Not So Simple

By MATTHEW HOLT

I went for an annual physical with my doctor at One Medical in December. OK it wasn’t actually annual as the last time I went was 2 & 1/2 years ago, but it was covered under the ACA, and my doc Andrew Diamond was bugging me because I’m old & fat. So in I went.

I had a general exam and great chat for about 45 minutes. Then I had blood work & labs (cholesterol, A1C, etc) and a TDAP vaccination as it had been more than 10 years since I’d had one.

Today, about one month later, I got an email asking me to pay One Medical. So being a difficult human, I thought I would go through the process and see how much a consumer can be expected to understand about what they should pay.

Here’s the email from One Medical saying, “you owe us money.”

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The Simpson’s Explain Healthcare

By KIM BELLARD

Happy New Year!  We’re starting 2022 full of hope and renewed optimism. Oh, wait; not so much. We’re not only still in a pandemic, the Omicron variant is the most infectious one yet.  Daily cases are setting new records. Our hospitals are full again. Our beleaguered healthcare workers – the ones who haven’t already thrown in the towel – are at their breaking points.  Two years in, and we still don’t have enough tests. We’re in the greatest public health crisis in a century, yet our legislators are taking power away from public health officials, and their angry constituents are forcing many of those officials to quit. We have effective vaccines, but millions still refuse to take them. 

The Simpsons – especially, Homer — has the right word for this: D’oh!

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Fall Risk: It’s All in Your Head

By HENRY MAHNCKE

More than one in four senior citizens fall each year, making it the leading cause of both fatal and non-fatal injuries in older adults. Anyone with a loved one at high risk of falls can tell you it creates constant worry and curtails many of life’s pleasures. And, if that loved one has fallen and broken a hip, too many of those caregivers can share the oft-told tale of how that break was the beginning of the end.

As our population grows and ages, the costs of this widespread risk multiply.  However, recent breakthroughs in the science of brain health demonstrate that we could be taking relatively low-cost, highly scalable, steps to reduce these risks.

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Rooting For Schumpter’s Gale

By KIM BELLARD

Not familiar with Schumpeter’s gale?  You may be more familiar with the term “creative destruction.”  Schumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction” is the inevitable “process of industrial mutation that continuously revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”  

We need a Schumpeter’s gale in healthcare.

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THCB Gang Episode 76, Dec 23 1pm PT – 4pm ET

This is the last THCB Gang of what has been a long, grueling, but enthralling year. And every week (well almost every week) we have had a group from across the health care luminescence to discuss it.

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang at 1pm PT 4pm ET Thursday for an hour of topical and sometime combative conversation on what’s happening in health care and beyond will be THCB regular writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard);  delivery & tech expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis); privacy expert and entrepreneur Deven McGraw (@HealthPrivacy); WTF Health host & Health IT girl Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa); and three occasional gang members making very welcome appearances–venture investor & soccer mogul Marcus Whitney (@marcuswhitney); surgeon & startup guy Raj Aggarwal (@docaggarwal); and health economist Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (@healthythinker).

And towards the end of the show we should have our now traditional (or 2nd time) visit from as many other gang members who can make it!

The video will be below but if you’d rather listen to the episode, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

My 22 Oldest Jokes and Why They Still Matter in 2022

By IAN MORRISON

I have been studying American healthcare for more than 40 years and I have assembled a large number of one-liners over the years. As we enter 2022, I thought I’d share my 22 oldest jokes and why they still matter. 

Coming to America 

  1. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland.  In Glasgow, healthcare is a right, carrying a machine gun is a privilege. America got it the wrong way round. 

Gun violence continues to ravage the United States. We have more guns than people. Kids get gunned down in school playgrounds and classrooms routinely. It happened once in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996 when a local shopkeeper walked into Dunblane Primary School and opened fire, killing 16 5- and 6-year-olds and their 45-year-old teacher.  It so galvanized public opinion, according to Smithsonian Magazine:  “By the end of 1997, Parliament had banned private ownership of most handguns, including a semi-automatic weapons ban and required mandatory registration for shotgun owners”. 

Last time I looked, gun violence was the second leading cause of death in children in the US.  In America when we have mass shootings all we get are thoughts and prayers. 

And when it comes to healthcare as a right, even if we Build Back Better, it won’t be a right for millions of American residents, especially those who are undocumented. 

  1. I am a Scottish Canadian Californian which gives me a unique perspective on healthcare (and all things to do with healthcare, including death and dying) because the Scots see death as imminent, Canadians see death as inevitable, and Californians see death as optional. 

This is one of my oldest jokes and it remains true.  In Silicon Valley, where I live, my affluent VC friends want to live forever and are working out and taking supplements to achieve that. In contrast, my British friend Dr. Richard Smith (former Editor of the BMJ) is sitting on the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death.  Enough said. 

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Not Just Token Tokens

By KIM BELLARD

I recently watched some of the recent Congressional hearings on cryptocurrency, and, boy, if there’s anything funnier than watching experts try to educate most members of Congress on anything crypto-related, it’s probably me trying to explain it.  I don’t own any digital assets, still don’t see the point of NFTs, and am not going to buy any real estate in the metaverse.  

All that being said, there’s something about Web3 that fascinates me.  Knowledgeable people are talking about Web3 “reinventing the internet,” “democratizing” it, giving people more ownership of/control over what they do on it.  It’s a counterbalance to how the internet – both the traffic and the infrastructure — has grown increasingly dominated by a few very large firms, such as Google, Facebook, or Amazon.

As the Web3 Foundation declares, Web3 is an internet where:

  • Users own their own data, not corporations
  • Global digital transactions are secure
  • Online exchanges of information and value are decentralized

All that sounds very intriguing to me, especially as someone who has dim views of how healthcare likes to silo information, has placed too little value on patient ownership of their own data, and is rushing to centralize.

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