Today’s guest is Tylon Wang, co-founder and CEO of Angle Health - an AI-native health plan that raised a $60m Series A with one goal: rebuild health plans from the ground up.

Ty shares how early experiences in engineering and federal government work shaped his problem-solving mindset, and how his time at Palantir exposed the deep fragmentation and misaligned incentives inside large healthcare organizations. We discuss why legacy insurers can’t innovate, how Angle built an AI-native full-stack health plan with a canonical data model, and why alternative funding models are reshaping employer-sponsored coverage. If you want a clear look at the future of payers, data infrastructure, and tech-enabled care, this episode is for you.

In this episode, we’re speaking with Dr. Mark Pauly, - a founding figures of modern health economics - about how we can build a better healthcare and insurance system.

From the origins of moral hazard to the political journey of the individual mandate, Dr. Pauly explains how policy choices ripple across the system. He breaks down why healthcare markets defy Econ 101 logic, why costs feel higher even when spending has flattened, and how externalities, from contagion to altruism, justify public involvement. He also reveals why tax subsidies for employer insurance quietly distort the market more than most people realize, and why fixing incentives may matter more than any new program.

In this episode, we're speaking with Dr. Maria Polyakova, Professor of Health Policy and Economics at Stanford, about how insurance design influences far more than access to healthcare.  Simply put, what if health insurance isn’t just about paying for care, but it's one of the biggest levers shaping the economy itself?

From Germany’s expansion of long-term care insurance that unexpectedly reduced unemployment, to IVF coverage that reshaped who gets to have children, Dr. Polyakova reveals how health policy acts as both economic stimulus and social design. She also explores why inefficiency, not just ideology, is one of the greatest barriers to reform in the U.S., and why fixing administrative waste might do more for Americans than any new program.

Today's guest is Cedric Kovacs-Johnson, the founder and CEO of Flume Health - a software platform that orchestrates data through a universal translation layer for payers. We discuss the administration problem in healthcare, Flume's product Relay, and why over 80% of enterprise data in healthcare is locked inside disconnected systems.

Cedric shares how his sister’s healthcare journey revealed the true bottleneck in care - the administrative web behind coverage decisions - and how Flume’s platform is helping health plans and vendors speak the same data language. We talk about what happens when innovation meets legacy infrastructure, why trust and simplicity are the keys to unlocking progress, and how startups can bring clarity to one of the world’s most jargon-filled industries. Cedric also reflects on his transition from 3D printing to healthcare and what it takes to turn complex systems into simple, human solutions.

In this episode, we sit down with Ashok Subramanian, founder and CEO of Centivo, a company rebuilding employer-based healthcare to make it radically more affordable. Before founding Centivo, Ashok launched Liazon, a benefits marketplace acquired by Willis Towers Watson, and began his career at McKinsey.

Ashok shares how Centivo is tackling the root causes of rising healthcare costs by centering plans around primary care, eliminating deductibles, and aligning incentives between employers, employees, and providers. He explains why the current “one-size-fits-all” model of employer coverage fails a diverse workforce, and how a more personalized, coordinated approach can improve both cost and quality. Finally, Ashok offers a vision for the future of employer-based care: one where affordability, access, and trust define the healthcare experience.

Dr. Katherine Baicker is the Provost of the University of Chicago and one of the most respected voices in health economics. Dr. Baicker explains that we shouldn't just be asking if healthcare is a right. It's time to set a coverage floor based on "how much of a right it is."

As a former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and Principal Investigator for the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, Dr. Baicker explores what makes the U.S. healthcare system so complex — and why comparisons to other countries often miss the mark.  She discusses her vision for a “Medicaid-for-All” model that balances universal access with innovation and fiscal sustainability. Finally, we dive into how economics can help us navigate the hard trade-offs between equity, efficiency, and innovation in healthcare’s future.

Syam Palakurthy is the CEO of SamaCare, a platform simplifying the prior authorization process for healthcare providers, payers, and patients. Last year, his team raised a $17M Series B with the goal of making paying for healthcare as simple as a credit card swipe.

In this episode, we explore how Syam went from Bain & Company and ClearCost Health to tackling one of healthcare’s most hated administrative burdens. He breaks down why prior authorization exists, why it’s so entrenched in our system, and what it would take to increase transparency. We talk about the coordination failures across insurers, providers, and pharma companies - and how AI and automation are finally closing those gaps. Syam also shares how scaling a solution in such a fragmented ecosystem requires both deep empathy for providers and a systems-level understanding of healthcare economics.

Today's guest, Dr. Joseph Newhouse, is a longtime Harvard professor whose research has shaped U.S. health policy for decades. He is best known for leading the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, the largest study ever conducted on health insurance and cost-sharing.

In this episode, we explore the story behind the RAND experiment - how it came to be, the challenges it faced, and what its findings revealed about how patients respond to cost-sharing. Dr. Newhouse explains why more care doesn’t always mean better health, and why outcomes varied so sharply for low-income patients with chronic conditions. We also discuss how RAND’s lessons still influence today’s debates over Medicaid, Medicare, and employer insurance, and where he thinks the study’s findings hold true. Finally, Dr. Newhouse reflects on what he might change if the experiment were run today, including how Medicare and value-based insurance design could be studied in new ways.

In this episode, we sit down with Professor Dr. Carol Heimer, a sociologist whose pioneering book Reactive Risk and Rational Action reshaped how scholars think about insurance, trust, and moral hazard. We chat about how concepts like moral hazard can affect consumers and physicians, and why insurance rules often lead to both overuse and underuse of care.

Dr. Heimer offers a rare lens on the U.S. healthcare system, explaining how insurer rules and reimbursement policies can affect medical practice and change physician discretion. We also discuss her research on neonatal intensive care units, where she shows how financial incentives, hospital policies, and insurance decisions shape care for critically ill infants, leaving parents to navigate trade-offs between quality and coverage. We close with her reflections on how healthcare is fundamentally interdependent, and why rethinking who sets the rules could help us build a fairer, more functional system of care.

See more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Heimer

In this episode, we sit down with Professor Dr. Ricardo Nuila, the best-selling author of The People's Hospital, which discusses Dr. Nuila’s experience as a physician at Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital, the difficulties of accessing healthcare in the US, and his vision for a more equitable health insurance model.

Dr. Nuila shares his journey from a three-generation medical family to working at Houston’s largest safety-net hospital, where patients can receive treatment regardless of their ability to pay. We explore why Texas presents unique challenges with its lack of Medicaid expansion, how local systems like Harris Health have stepped in to fill the gap, and what makes Ben Taub a trusted institution in the community. Through patient stories, from a restaurant manager overwhelmed by costs despite being insured, to a young college student blindsided by illness, Dr. Nuila illustrates the cracks in our system that affect both the uninsured and underinsured. We close with his perspective on what a sustainable two-tier model of public and private care could look like, and how storytelling through medicine and writing can help us reimagine a better future for healthcare.