Introduction to Episode 487
[00:00:00] Stacey Richter: Episode 487. "A Former Police Detective Investigates the 3 Big Barriers to the Public Sector Getting Better Affordable Health Benefits." This I would call Part 1 today. I am speaking with Kevin Lyons.
Viral Video and Metaphor for Healthcare
[00:00:33] Stacey Richter: Did everyone see that video of the CEO snatching the tennis hat out of that kid's hands at the US Open a few weeks ago. Short version and watch the video. It's all over the internet.
To listen to this episode or read the show notes with the mentioned links, visit the episode page.
A tennis star who had just won his match is walking off the court signing autographs and he hands a kid, this cute towheaded preteen, the tennis star kind of haphazardly hands this kid a hat as he walks off the court. And as soon as that kid's fingers, you know, starts to take the hat, this grown ass man reaches down, forcefully, grabs that hat, the kid starts crying.
This man now turns out, speaking of investigations, the internet deduced in T minus 30 minutes that this hat grabber man is actually a CEO of some paving company in Poland.
But after the kid starts crying and pointing. The CEO has a moment of reflection. He gives the kid a millisecond once over, and then he jams the hat into his wife's handbag. Finder's, keeper's, losers weeper style. Watch the video if you haven't seen it. It's sort of shocking to behold. Honestly!
What is also shocking, maybe even more shocking was the guy's reaction afterwards, which wasn't a, “wow. I was caught up in the moment and I did a crappy thing.” Nope. His reaction was first come, first served. He actually wrote this in a response apparently, according to several, somewhat unreliable sources.
This whole thing, if I wanted to get metaphorical about it, which I apparently do, the whole thing could be a five second summary of the big problem I have with that Charlie Munger quote, Warren Buffett's partner. Charlie Munger famously said, "Show me an incentive and I'll show you an outcome".
And I got an issue with that when it comes to healthcare because it implies just because it is possible to shake down a kid for a hat or shake down a firefighter for another 10 grand, you should do it.
I'm moving along real fast with this metaphor, but it's really something to think about as the introduction to this conversation coming up with Kevin Lyons, who is a former police detective and current executive director, law enforcement, labor employee benefits over at the New Jersey State, PBA (Policemen’s Benevolent Association).
And let's keep in mind, the family plan in the state of New Jersey for state workers now costs $67,000 having almost doubled in the past five years in price. That's the total cost.
And the crazy backwards thing is the unions are the ones who are fighting to rationalize the cost of healthcare to make it affordable for themselves and taxpayers alike to put forth innovative solutions that actually reduce costs, which you think the legislature would be doing. It's a strikingly weird role reversal.
[00:03:41] Stacey Richter: Okay, so back to first come, first served. Here's the undeniable thing. The healthcare industry, its corporate leaders. I'm gonna say not everybody, operate just like any other business with a first come, first served guiding principle.
If you can get the money from your customers, you'd be a dummy not to take it. I mean, to do otherwise would be a violation of your fiduciary duty to your board or your shareholders, right? If you are the sales team at one of these corporate healthcare companies, they're corporations, you'll get fired if you say, well, we knew how to get our customer to pay $10, but I said, oh, only pay me six. Imagine announcing that at the shareholders meeting or to the board.
We forget this is reality at our own peril. Many would love to plug their ears and do the ignorance is bliss thing. But yeah, it is not possible to argue with any unbiased integrity that the healthcare industry in New Jersey and in this country is an industry just like any other industry.
And first come, first served is their motto, just like any other industry. No judgment here. Just stating very easily proven facts.
Healthcare Costs and Union Challenges
[00:04:48] Stacey Richter: And look, the state of New Jersey, just like many other buyers of healthcare, is a really unsophisticated buyer right now. You'd think that wouldn't be the case considering healthcare for state workers is coming up here going to be a 3.5 billion dollar spend, and it's been rapidly escalating, way higher than inflation and almost any other benchmark you can compare it to like the healthcare costs of other state health plans.
It's also one of the state's biggest line items in the state budget. But yeah, we get one rookie error after another being made dealing with these vendors operating just like any other vendor. First come, first served.
And tragically, as a result, the state employees and taxpayers are getting wildly taken advantage of for billions of excess dollars, getting first come, first served right into industry pockets.
Why is the state and many others getting first come, first served? Well, Kevin Lyons walks us through three barriers, very articulately for what goes on in the public sector, which we have not discussed heretofore on the pod. So I was all over it.
Bottom line is this, even though the metaphorical man grabs the metaphorical hat and wrote first come first served on the internet. There are many who smile and believe everything that man's metaphorical, highly compensated lobbyists put on their desks and fancy full color glossy reports year after year after year.
They continue to believe what the man tells them and look, in all fairness, this is complex stuff, this healthcare stuff, we are 487 episodes into it here and still going strong.
Listen to the show with Vivian Ho about the ways that consolidated hospital systems are in this mix. Listen to the flywheel shows with Jonathan Baran. Listen to the Payment Integrity Show with Kimberly Carleson. Yeah, there are container ships of hats going missing, but once you know where to look, you can find them.
So here's my conversation with Kevin Lyons about the three barriers for getting the healthcare escalating costs flywheel to slow its roll.
Next week come back for Part 2, where Kevin Lyons shares how he uses some of the skills he learned in detective training to deduce what's going on with his healthcare dollars. Where they are disappearing to what he writes in that little detective notebook I am imagining he carries around even to this day.
So with that, here is Kevin Lyons in Part 1 of this conversation.
My name is Stacey Richter. This podcast is sponsored by Aventria Health Group.
Interview With Kevin Lyons Begins
[00:07:32] Stacey Richter: Kevin Lyons, welcome to Relentless Health Value.
[00:07:34] Kevin Lyons: Hello, Stacey. It's really awesome to be here. I'm really excited about this. Thank you for asking me to come on.
[00:07:39] Stacey Richter: Many who get themselves enmeshed in this buying of benefits business or even trying to figure out what's going on in the healthcare industry business, I'd say it becomes pretty clear, pretty quick that some detective skills are required.
So I am very much looking forward to speaking with a former detective here in a past life. But maybe once you become a detective, you never really stop. So let's dig in here.
[00:08:04] Kevin Lyons: No, I think, I think that, like you said, these two sides of my career have, have had certainly meshed, right?
Because you need to investigate and see what's going on. If something doesn't look right, it doesn't smell right, it's just not right. I don't know if it's made it easier for me to dig in on things, but certainly my background has helped me in some ways.
[00:08:23] Stacey Richter: I can imagine that it would in, in two ways.
Exactly like you just said, if something doesn't smell right, you wanna dig in and you probably get an instinct for like, what doesn't smell right. And then secondly, just the whole dig in part, like how do you do that and get the answers that you're looking for.
Barriers to Affordable Healthcare
[00:08:39] Stacey Richter: If we're thinking about New Jersey getting public employees and unions better in affordable healthcare, why this is at a critical moment right now?
[00:08:48] Kevin Lyons: Well, we have rate proposals for 2026 of over 37% for public employees in New Jersey.
[00:08:54] Stacey Richter: Wait, 3 7?
[00:08:56] Kevin Lyons: Three seven. And that's, we've had double digit increases the past four years. So cumulatively over five years, it's, it'll be 115% starting January 26th. That's how much our, our rates have gone up for a PPO that most public employees have.
[00:09:12] Stacey Richter: We're talking teachers, police officers.
[00:09:14] Kevin Lyons: The people who pick up your trash to the secretaries in an office. This is everybody. This is just not law enforcement, you know, this is across the board. When you get involved in the government side, at least if it's an ERISA plan, you have the Taft Hartley laws and you have those laws that can be enforced.
States and municipalities can claim sovereign immunity, that they can do whatever they want. And the laws are so heavily influenced by the people that the laws are supposed to be enforced upon, it's almost impossible to get anything done. Try getting a bill passed.
That cartoon when we were kids was, seemed very simple. It's not simple.
[00:09:49] Stacey Richter: Summarizing, if you're trying to change anything with the benefits, it has to go through a legislative procedure. Like in the private sector, you get the right decision makers in a room and you actually, I mean there's bureaucracy in some given company, but it pales in comparison to the gridlock and infrastructure and bureaucracy in government.
But the other thing you're saying is when you're faced with a 37% rate increase without any of these requirements, you can just cost shift the whole thing, for example.
[00:10:19] Kevin Lyons: And in a lot of ways that's what they've done to maintain the status quo, which is what a lot of people out there want.
They like the status quo. They don't care if we, the pot of money gets bigger, that's what they want. So I'm very skeptical because of the lobbying dollars and because of the political influence. It's a tremendous challenge, you know, to try and show them what the problems are.
[00:10:38] Stacey Richter: Okay, so there's been some serious foreshadowing, probably leading up to the first barrier, why it is so hard to get public employees and union members affordable benefits in the, as I just said, the public sector.
Profit Defense and Political Influence
[00:10:54] Stacey Richter: And the first one that you had identified as Profit Defends Profit. Do you wanna dig in a little bit there?
[00:11:00] Kevin Lyons: You know, I can't understand why the lobby groups for, let's say the hospitals or the insurers have the same, if not more influence than the people who are represented by the plan. A lot of times, you know, we come with cost saving measures that would save dozens of percent on the rates, but oh, we can't do that because we have a contract.
Well then fix your contract. You know? Because we don't contract. Only the state can contract.
[00:11:24] Stacey Richter: Profit, defends profit. And you've just said this, you've got industry that is very happy with the status quo, frankly, because I think it would be a problem to forget that somebody's cost is somebody else's profit. And if rates are going up 37%, then somebody is making 37% right? And it could be a bunch of somebodies, but those dollars aren't just like disappearing somehow. It's like somebody's making this money.
[00:11:49] Kevin Lyons: Politicians' number one job is to get reelected. I looked at some stats the other day besides the real estate industry, medical is the biggest contributor to politics.
[00:11:58] Stacey Richter: By medical you mean carriers? You mean hospitals?
[00:12:01] Kevin Lyons: Carriers, hospitals, pharma, they're all just dumping tons of money into this. So, it's hard for them and they want to get reelected. Right? The problem from their side is that they listen to people that they've contracted with. They say, “Oh, that's not happening.”
I mean, it's that heartbreaking sometimes because you can show them what's going on. You show the people in charge. Hospital prices are going up at 10% a year, but they do nothing to enforce any either the clauses of the contract that'll put them back into line.
We're pushing right now a transparency bill, that'll have a benchmark, and we're getting tons of blowback on it. There's a property tax gap in New Jersey. Municipal budgets can't go up by more than 2% a year. How can you have that and not regulate the health benefits side of things.
So those kind of things are, it's extremely frustrating because you know where the influence is coming from, you know where the stories are coming from, but it's just, it's such a challenge to educate these people.
Because a lot of them, the people who are administering the plans are career bureaucrats and then they're governed by politicians. It is problematic to try and be innovative and try and do the right thing.
[00:13:06] Stacey Richter: Who has the ultimate authority are representatives, politicians who were elected, and as you just said, their main job is to get reelected.
So you've got two bits to this. One of them is if they look at their war chest for how to get reelected, and a lot of dollars are coming from the status quo healthcare industry, which is basically what you just said, a main campaign contributor.
So you've got that kind of sitting off to the side while at the same time, this is complicated. It's unintuitive like sometimes things that you think you know should be the way of it. You just start digging in and what seems very logical is absolutely not logical. As anyone who listens to this show for any length of time, figures out on the quick.
But they're sitting above it, kind of looking down, probably not spending, they're not detectives, then they're listening to their major campaign contributor because the lobbyist is coming in and saying like, “Let me show you my glossy PR which looks amazing because I've got lots of money so I can afford it.”
So, they've got these little buzzes in their ear then therefore you come in and you're like, or the benefit committees are just people who really know what they're doing, come in and they're, you know, you're trying to explain why to do something else.
You're countermanded that sounds kind of intractable.
[00:14:26] Kevin Lyons: It's extremely difficult and then you're put in a position. Where all there is to do is, is yell about it. You go to the media, you go on RHV, you, you just keep talking about it. You just keep telling everybody what's really going on and then they dismiss it.
That's not what's happening, but give no substance to their argument. They're so convincing in their arguments and they have a team of people. And billions of dollars that they can invest in this.
[00:14:52] Stacey Richter: If their main job is to get reelected, they see where their bread is buttered and it's very time consuming to think otherwise.
[00:15:02] Kevin Lyons: Unions can't do that. We can't tax our members. We can give a hundred thousand dollars in an election. We have 33,000 members in the New Jersey State, PBA, do the math.
[00:15:10] Stacey Richter: You can even get even less if benefits are going up 37%.
[00:15:14] Kevin Lyons: Sure we can't keep taxing our members and it for a PAC. It's impossible. The system's set up for us to fail for the representatives of the employees to fail.
[00:15:24] Stacey Richter: It almost sounds like another flywheel.
So we started out talking about how profit, defends profit, and for sure I can hear how that's going on.
And the one solution that I am hearing you talk about. So we've articulated a lot of issues here and it sounds like the only thing that you have on your side, as you said, just keep talking about it. Just keep talking about this is the situation, keep hammering the point. And trying to get your union members probably also to have a measure of understanding here, because they're also voters.
So that could probably be harnessed. But again, you're fighting against these huge publicity machines who may be countermanding everything that you say, even among your own memberships.
[00:16:05] Kevin Lyons: In New Jersey to get anything done, you need the Senate president, the governor, and the speaker to all agree on something.
They have outside influence or they're, they're even just being told things, even if it's not a financial influence. If they're just being told things that are contradictory, who are they gonna listen to? Are they gonna listen to the road cop who became a detective who's telling them what's going on? Who's actually dug in on this stuff? Or are they gonna listen to the guy in the suit who walks in their office and is taking care of the people in their party?
[00:16:32] Stacey Richter: It's just like that Upton Sinclair quote. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
[00:16:40] Kevin Lyons: Like we hear all the time as lobbyists for, you know, the hospitals and the insurers say they don't understand. Well, the problem is we do, we do understand what's going on and we're trying to help them because we are also taxpayers who, we are all, we're paying these high premiums, but we're also paying them by way of our property taxes as well.
And then when you get into negotiations, it's always like they keep throwing money at things. If we keep throwing money at it, yeah, they're all gonna take it. The providers and the insurers are gonna take the money if you just keep making them. But let's make it a reasonable cost. Let's try and get everything to a reasonable cost. And that's what we want. We want high quality care for reasonable cost.
We don't want the municipal and county budgets and state budgets to go up because of us. We wanna be able to take some of this money and put it in our salaries because our wages are shrinking every year because of these increases. Our members pay 35% of the cost of a plan that's going to cost $67,000 next year. You know, for a family.
[00:17:36] Stacey Richter: $67,000!
[00:17:38] Kevin Lyons: $67,000 for the PPO that I've been in for 30 years, and like I said, it's doubled in the past five. Doesn't anybody else see this?
[00:17:48] Stacey Richter: I think you just nailed it in what you just said there. If individuals who are in charge here have a level of understanding, which is basically this is an intractable issue, that you just have to keep throwing money at the problem and that we've got foxes guarding henhouses, and just give the fox some more money, and seriously, this time, this time.
And then the prices keep going up and up and up and you're kind of like, what's the definition of insanity? If it didn't work last year, like, why do we think it's gonna,
[00:18:15] Kevin Lyons: My favorite quote.
[00:18:16] Stacey Richter: Work this year? But here we are, and the flywheel continues to churn because there's really not, it sounds like a ton of incentive for any of these individuals given the campaign contribution situation to really alter what they're doing.
[00:18:33] Kevin Lyons: It's just easier for them to throw money at things. It's easier for them to just say, “Alright, well, we'll contribute a little bit more. You contribute a little bit more. We'll lower your plan, your actuarial value a little bit and you could pay a little bit higher copay or a bigger deductible.” That's been the frog in the water.
[00:18:51] Stacey Richter: Which works until it doesn't.
All right, so number two here, barrier. So we, we covered number one, which is profit defends profit.
Government Inefficiencies and Conflicts of Interest
[00:19:05] Stacey Richter: Another one is gonna be that the government tends to not pay its employees, its full-time employees to save money. What winds up happening is you have sort of inexperienced people in positions of great decision making they delegate to their consultants who are the incumbents. And then again, you wind up with a fox guarding a hen house situation.
[00:19:20] Kevin Lyons: Government generally doesn't pay, right? If they brought in the best people, the best analysts, they don't wanna pay 'em because there's just this aura that, oh, we can't pay somebody $250,000 a year, where that person could actually save them 10 times their salary.
In my state, the plan that covers almost 800,000 lives doesn't have a medical director. It doesn't have any, they employ no pharmacists. They cede all that responsibility to their contracted partners I call 'em, you know, their business partners, which we have nobody looking at for our interests solely from our side.
Like I went through an appeal to an appeal for one of our members who had brain cancer, and it was about photon versus proton therapy. The carrier sent a pediatrician on behalf of the state to advocate for the commission and the government. Well, that's just an insult to me that this dying member doesn't deserve a doctor who's an oncologist, who's a radiologist, at least to come in and explain their position.
We ultimately won that in court, by the way. We took it up to the next level and, and appealed the committee's decision, the commissioner's decision, and won that.
[00:20:28] Stacey Richter: And that whole prior auth in court and lawyers probably cost more than whatever would have been saved by using the wrong therapy. If there would have been any savings, given that it wouldn't have actually worked well or to deal with the nasty side effects. And now there's a however long delay for a patient that has a brain tumor merrily growing away.
[00:20:50] Kevin Lyons: Those are the kind of things that are just, if nobody's looking out for our interests, only special interests are looking out for the special interests. Then this death spiral, as we call it, is gonna continue.
[00:21:01] Stacey Richter: What is the translation of that in the private sector, normal business operations, you have a vendor like the steel vendor, and you put the steel vendor in charge of steel prices that your company is paying, and you just hand 'em a checkbook and you're just like, all right, what do you think?
I mean, it's so obvious that this is not an unbiased party who's now put in a position to be unbiased and expecting them to be unbiased.
[00:21:25] Kevin Lyons: And when we brought in consultants in New Jersey where the state was under different leadership previously, the plan with Chris Deacon, you know, she had great consultants come in.
The state chased them away once Chris moved on because they were upsetting the apple cart.
[00:21:41] Stacey Richter: If they're the right consultants. We've had on this podcast over and over and over again, just how conflicted some consultants are getting all kinds of indirect payments that, as you just said, public entities aren't subject to, for example, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, at least at this time.
So, right, like documenting those indirect payments is not a requirement here.
[00:22:09] Kevin Lyons: No, you're absolutely correct. And it, even with point solutions, you know, we're trying to do some things and some of the people that the state will bring in has to be brought in through their TPA or their PBM, right?
So they asked the labor side and it, and in New Jersey, and I don't wanna be specific to New Jersey on this, but that's my practical knowledge. But in New Jersey, we have six from labor and six from management that have to make any plan design changes. So in order to get anything done, you need a seventh vote. So one person from the other side has to vote.
In this specific space it was a “GLP-1 solution.” So being the resident skeptic and asking the questions that nobody wants to be asked, I said, do you have any business relationship with the PBM? And he said, Well, we have a strategic partnership
Now, I didn't go to business school. I learned this as we go. But just those two words together, I mean, so you're both gonna make money on this, right? That, that's how I see it. If it's a strategic partnership. You're not gonna have a strategic partnership that only one side makes money.
So digging in on those things is so important for us to bring an outside independent person with no conflicts and have a contract like that that says they can't have conflicts is almost a an impossibility, because once again, we go back to the status quo.
[00:23:21] Stacey Richter: Yeah, for sure. And as we started talking about this barrier, which is basically not employing the kind of talent that, and, and when I say talent, I mean maybe the level of expertise, but potentially also the kind of expertise as you said, like there's no medical director in the state of New Jersey. How are you gonna make good appropriate care decisions when you have no person that's sitting on your side of the table.
And that same analogy is probably true across the board. If you're talking about what should the price be, what there's so many, which should the care pathway be? What, which should the benefit design, how should we navigate, right?
Like there's a lot of decisions where you really wanna make sure that someone who's totally unconflicted with no, “strategic partnerships” that are influencing the decisions that they're making.
And just to highlight that, I just get myself involved in many conversations. I just had one recently talking to the head of benefits for a big teacher's union. I say, “Hey, what do you, what do you, what are you thinking about skyrocketing specialty pharmacy spend? Like, what are you doing there?”
Generally speaking, when I asked that question, I put on a helmet and fastened my seatbelt because there's gonna be like hand waving and possibly tears at some juncture.
But the answer I got was totally unexpected. She said, “Oh, we have very good insurance coverage.” She's the head of benefits. So I said, what's your experience? And she said, “Oh, well I had this other job.” She was like an audiologist or something and she just got put into, now she's head of benefits.
So like you, you have, you know exactly like you just said. Like just someone who has zero experience here, who's put in this very, very high decision making job, who do they get educated by? Oh, well, their consultants who may work for the carriers or who may work for other incumbents.
[00:25:03] Kevin Lyons: I see that on a regular basis with the committees, with the state.
We'll get a new member. And it's like, what's your background in, in healthcare? Oh, I have health benefits. When our president, at the time Tony Wieners appointed me to this seat, I said, “Tony, I know a little bit about this being involved in negotiating contracts for my members in my department. I'm like, I gotta go to school.”
You know, so I started going to classes, I started getting involved, and a lot of people don't wanna do that, and I don't like to play victim, but when we're trying to fix something and nobody's listening, I can bring ideas to the state government and say, we should do this. And they don't have an answer.
They come back, well, you, we can't do that because it's contracting. Or I send them one of your podcasts. Yeah, you gotta listen to this. Oh, that was very interesting. I mean, how do you know you're running the state health benefits plan, you're telling us that you're in control of it and you don't know these things.
Why do I know 'em and not you? Because I guess because I expect more of myself, but they won't go out and get a real plan administrator who works for the state and pay 'em what they're worth. A lot of the people are institutional that are there. They're wonderful people. They're well-meaning I've never had a problem with any of 'em personally. They care about our members, but when it comes to the strategy of a plan, they fail miserably.
Media Influence and Public Perception
[00:26:19] Stacey Richter: Our third barrier is that the media and publications are often sponsored by the incumbents. So not only are there lobbyists running around, not only are there all the things that we just talked about happening, but also the media.
Their bread is buttered oftentimes by some of these big companies who are kind of the only ones that can afford the advertising.
[00:26:42] Kevin Lyons: It's probably the most frustrating thing when I pull up to, especially police union event, and I see the state's TPA is sponsoring the event. So, being the timid and shy person that I am, I usually go right to the organization's president and say, “What the hell is that doing here?”
You know, because I don't wanna be here. If that's here, and they, well, they gave me $15,000. What, what am I supposed to do? I'm like, say no, because that's your $15,000. It, it's just we're being gaslit.
And it's such a barrier for me to educate members and say, listen, it's not the color of your card. It's who you can go to. It's what services you're gonna get. Are they, are they high quality providers? And they, we've just been so indoctrinated into this, this is what health benefits are, this color. And that's what we have to change. That's the culture I'm striving to change even in our magazine. The TPA is advertising.
I think at the end of the day, what we have to do is continue to educate them. We shouldn't be letting some fly by night doctor advertise in our magazine, you know, without being vetted.
I think we have a responsibility as union leaders to do that. That's a real important part of this process of change that we have to bring on.
I remember one day I was, I was watching a baseball game and I actually texted Chris Deacon. I'm like, New York Presbyterian is advertising on the Mets jerseys. And it's like, well, if they have enough money to do that, drop your prices a little bit. And then the whole not-for-profit thing, that that's a different, I don't wanna go down that rabbit hole.
But just the fact that we see this every day of our lives. When I drive to work, I see these huge, huge billboards advertised, oh, we're the best in knee replacement. Uh, I'll see a sign, you know, for gastro, whatever services they wanna do. They're building $4 billion worth of hospital improvements in New Jersey this year.
So where's that going? It's going to the profit centers and then to teach people that and to get it through their heads that, listen, just because they're flashy doesn't mean they're better. Maybe not.
[00:28:38] Stacey Richter: I saw an investigative journalism and I, and I'm saying that in half air quotes, right. About what was going on in health benefits in New Jersey and you watch the whole thing. There's a journalist who's talking about it, and at the very end, for 30 seconds, the sponsor pops up, which as you just said, is the TPA being investigated, you know, in air quotes. So it's just a really striking scenario.
The barriers that we talked about are profit defends profit. so that was the first thing. The more profit the one side has, because somebody's profit is somebody else's costs, the higher the costs are on the other side, and then the less money they have,
It's kind of this flywheel here. We just had a show with Jonathan Baran about the healthcare flywheel. The second one is that, again, The less money there actually is that the unions or the state coffers have, the less opportunity there is to hire FTEs, full-time employees, and the expertise that's required and the level of talent that's required to mitigate some of these factors.
So then the situation just gets worse and you have jobs that require a lot of expertise and a lot of courage and just, you wanna have the right person in the job. You can't delegate everything. Or you know, even the courage to hire the right kind of consultant.
And then lastly, you've got the media sponsored by the same entities. So they're gonna do a really hard hitting journalistic piece, cutting down their biggest, their biggest advertiser, right? Like there's just, yeah, it's not subtle.
[00:30:03] Kevin Lyons: We're just so gaslit by the system. That's a place that, you know, the education portion, which is incredibly difficult because people don't wanna think about that.
They just wanna be able to know they can go to the doctor. But when my members are having a thousand dollars a paycheck taking outta their paycheck, I'm like, okay, are you listening now? Can you hear me now?
Conclusion and Teaser for Part Two
[00:30:23] Stacey Richter: Okay, tribe. So you heard Kevin use his detective skills to really hone in on what the barriers to stopping the flywheel driving up healthcare costs are.
Next week though, come back because we're gonna have part two of this conversation which Kevin talks about how he pulls out his notebook and uses what he learned as a detective to, first of all, figure out everything probably that we just talked about in this part one.
But also, you can't solve for something unless you do what most investigators do, which is follow the money. So see on the other side.
Thanks so much for listening.
[00:30:59] Cora Opsahl: Hi, this is Cora Opsahl with the 32BJ Health Fund. If you love Relentless Health Value just like I do, then I'll encourage you, please sign up for the newsletter, follow on your podcast app, and leave a review. Tell everyone else about how great this is and I'll let you're learning.