Welcome to Health is Other People

My honest confession about healthcare's beautiful torture

It has taken me at least three months to write this first post. Not because I didn't have anything to say (I’ve been writing for weeks, boring anyone who comes within earshot), but because it's hard to put my ambition into real words.

My career in healthcare has conditioned me to keep my head down and mouth shut - you can make a comfortable living by not saying the wrong things to doctors, executives, and lawyers who are all technically right, but completely missing each other's point. But I'm done with the beautiful torture of watching brilliant people talk past each other in conference rooms, year after year, because we're all too unsure to say what we actually think.

In the age of AI, strategy decks and tech solutions are cheap - none of those things have fixed healthcare yet. What's going to be rare is someone willing to explain the hidden truth that might actually move us forward. So I have an irrepressible belief that we can change the way we talk about American healthcare in order to fix it. This is crazy and audacious (and naive), but I'd rather fail trying to fix this cultural mess than spend another decade talking in circles.

Why Healthcare Became So Damn Boring (and Hard to Talk About)

Healthcare is literally how people live and die. It’s science, economics, policy, ethics, innovation, and heartbreak all rolled into one impossibly complex system. It touches every single person, drives one-fifth of the U.S. economy, and shapes society’s future. We're talking about an industry with the most innovative strategies, incomprehensible amounts of money, sci-fi levels of medical advancement, and stakes that couldn't be higher... yet somehow we've managed to make it boring.

This vital industry drowns in incomprehensible medical jargon and self-serving talking points. It's buried under mind-numbing technical details and empty policy platitudes that say nothing while sounding important. It’s the most exciting story, but blandly told. Unless it’s a pandemic, healthcare is relegated to the back of a newspaper - an afterthought, tucked away after the sports section.

That’s part of the problem why the U.S. can’t figure out healthcare: There is no compelling conversation to keep people engaged for meaningful dialogue.

My mission is to cut through the jargon, nagging, and performative policy-speak. I want to shift the conversation towards common values, rather than the tug-of-war of special interests. I want to help smart leaders see the whole system - not just their silo - and inspire us to move towards something, ANYTHING better than this.

Why Me? (Fair Question)

I don't possess a medical mission, a policy passion, a scientific specialty, nor any tech talents. And evidently, I’m an amateur writer.

But according to the Partners who sell my billable hours, I'm a management consultant (whatever that means) with over a dozen years of healthcare consulting work across this entire messy ecosystem. Providers, payers, pharma, policy, tech - I've worked in both private and public sectors, been elbow-to-elbow with everyone from C-suite suits to staff in scrubs.

As a healthcare consultant, I've felt like an outsider watching this dysfunction unfold. It's like being a therapist observing an argument - you can see exactly why everyone's fighting while they're completely blind to it. I've sat on the provider side helping hospitals collect more revenue from insurance, then moved to the payer side working with health plans to manage those same costs. It's like watching your parents argue about money, except you're secretly working for both sides and making it worse.

Most people who talk about healthcare reform usually focus on their corner: Providers complain about how hard it is to deliver care. Payers obsess about the economics. Policymakers just talk in circles. But I've been in rooms with all of them, so maybe I can actually make sense of this mess.

Money, People, Philosophy

Am I truly naive enough to think that I can fix healthcare? Barack freaking Obama couldn’t do it, and he won a Nobel Prize. But if I'm going to take on such an ambitious mission, I should lay out the three things I've learned from sitting in rooms across this entire system:

• The Money Has to Flow Differently
  Don Berwick said "every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." Our healthcare system is incredibly efficient at generating profit, which tells you exactly what we've designed it to do. If we want different results (better outcomes, lower costs, actual equity), we have to change what gets rewarded. Right now we pay for volume, procedures, and complexity. Until we pay for health, relationships, and simplicity, we'll keep getting expensive sickness care.

• Other People Have to Come First
  The U.S. healthcare system is phenomenal at processing transactions - sending referrals, prescribing meds, selling insurance. What it's terrible at is human relationships. Patients feel like widgets on an assembly line. Doctors are running on hamster wheels. Administrators are drowning in paperwork. Everyone's optimizing for their own efficiency instead of connection, which is insane for an industry that's fundamentally about caring for other human beings.

• The Philosophy Has to Get Real
  Here's what we collectively can’t seem to talk about: healthcare is a moral imperative disguised as a business problem. We keep trying to solve it with market mechanisms and technical solutions while ignoring that we're dealing with fundamental questions about human dignity, social responsibility, and what we owe each other. Until we have an honest reflection about the philosophical choices we're making - and stop pretending they're just economic ones - we'll keep building systems that work great on spreadsheets and terrible for actual people.

Money, People, Philosophy aren't separate problems - they're interconnected. The money flows the way it does because of our philosophical assumptions about what healthcare should be. Those assumptions shape how we treat people within the system. And how we treat people determines what kind of outcomes we're willing to accept for our money.

Change one without changing the others, and you'll just create new dysfunction in a different place.

The Actual Plan (Such As It Is)

I'm going to use my writing to do three things:

First, craft a vision for shifting healthcare culture to articulate our shared values. The healthcare system is ultimately made of people, and real change requires culture shift - not just policy tweaks or new technology. Whether that happens through this newsletter, a book, or building a community of people who actually want to solve this thing, I'm not sure yet.

Second, turn my thoughts and observations into something that might actually move the needle. I've done plenty of corporate healthcare jobs, but what feels meaningful is trying to influence the culture itself. Maybe that's a book, maybe it's getting published somewhere that matters, maybe it's just finding the right people to have better conversations with. My dream is to create something that changes how we think about healthcare, because I believe changing hearts and minds is our only real shot at fixing this.

Third, show you exactly who I am without the professional filter. I'm at this weird sweet spot where I have enough experience to offer a perspective, but I'm not so entrenched that I won't say risky things. It's now or never for speaking up, because in another decade I'll either be too invested in the status quo or too burned out to care. I'm not here to be intellectual or detached. This is a place to demonstrate my sincere beliefs.

The format? We'll figure it out as we go. I know I want to write deep dives that explain why healthcare works the way it does, covering strategy, operations, technology, and culture from multiple angles. Maybe some longer pieces about regional healthcare markets (Boston’s impact on Worcester), maybe my dream of The Wire-meets-revenue-cycle TV script I wish existed (The Cycle sounds awesome). I have more drafts than published posts right now, so honestly, we'll see what resonates with readers.

Who This Is For (And Why You Should Care)

I'm looking to talk to people who are tired of the same healthcare conversations that go nowhere. If you've ever sat in a meeting thinking "we're all talking past each other" or wondered why smart people keep building systems that make everyone miserable - you're my people.

In the age of AI disruption, I believe this is the best time to fix this. Strategies, policies, and science will have evolutionary leaps in this era, but the missing piece is speaking truth to power through conversation. Not with another policy paper or another digital health startup promising to disrupt everything, but by actually talking to each other like human beings who want the same basic thing: healthcare that doesn't suck.

So here we are. "Health is Other People" - because it really is, and other people are complicated, but maybe we can figure this out together.

Welcome to the conversation I've been wanting to have for years.