A few weeks ago, Graham sat down with Dr. Wendy Dean, co-founder of Moral Injury in Healthcare, for one of his favorite conversations this show has ever recorded. It's the kind of episode that changes how you talk about your own job.

That's why this week, How I Doctor is doing something new: handing the feed over to Wendy's own show, 43cc, which she co-hosts with orthopedic surgeon Dr. Matt Ramsey. 43cc bills itself as informal, informative, and irreverent, and if this episode is representative, that's undersold. It's the conversation you'd have with a colleague after a brutal clinic day, if you let yourself say the quiet part out loud.

In this episode, Wendy and Matt start from a real patient encounter, a $3,100 out-of-pocket shoulder MRI on a $6,500 deductible, and use it to walk through exactly how the system got this expensive and this hard to fix from the inside. They don't stop at diagnosing the problem. They name the specific legislative mechanism (a provision buried in the Affordable Care Act) that keeps physicians from building an alternative, and the bills currently in Congress trying to undo it.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

Why one patient's $3,100 out of pocket MRI charge reveals exactly how high deductible plans are designed to work against patients, not for them
The real difference between concierge medicine and direct primary care, and why Wendy argues only one of them actually changes the underlying cost of care
How Section 6001 of the Affordable Care Act froze the growth of physician owned hospitals in 2010, and why reversing it has become one of the more promising paths to real competition in healthcare
Why employer sponsored health plans, not federal legislation, may be the most realistic lever for forcing change in how insurers and hospitals operate

Subscribe to 43cc wherever you get your podcasts to hear more from Wendy Dean and Matt Ramsey. Full episode and show notes here: 43ccpodcast.com

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📝 For a full transcript of this episode click HERE

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