Episode Details

Lauren Vela is back on the pod today with a summer short that originally was a section of episode 406 that, unfortunately, I had to cut. It was a little bit tangential to the "why with the employer inertia" theme that the original episode was about. But tangential does not mean unimportant. This clip has some really critical insights on a different topic that may or may not to a greater or lesser degree contribute to inertia. And I'm gonna call this other topic the benefit design that most employees might ultimately be the most satisfied with might not be the one that they are explicitly asking for.

Let's start with three kinds of market research insights that Lauren Vela, my guest in this healthcare podcast, uncovered when interviewing friends and neighbors not in the healthcare industry about their benefits:

1. Nobody reads their benefit information.

2. They are unhappy with their benefits.

3. The most important thing for them is to have choice. They want to avoid the notion of "managed care."

In thinking about this, I was reminded of a Henry Ford quote: "If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse."

Or Steve Jobs famously said, "Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do." Jobs's whole thing, after all, was that true innovation often comes from anticipating customer needs and desires before they can articulate them themselves.

So, let me reconcile Lauren's findings when she interviewed people about what they want in their benefits and what Henry Ford and Steve Jobs have to say about the matter.

First of all, patients/plan members—most people have never experienced a comprehensive primary care situation where they are assisted in finding the highest-quality specialists or sub-specialists and have their care coordinated. They have never had someone worrying about them in their "in-between spaces," as Amy Scanlan, MD (EP402), put it, between appointments. This is all just a fantasy. It is a reputed Shangri-la that almost no one has ever seen with their own two eyes.

But what many have seen—I have; you have—are narrow networks in which cost containment is wielded like a brute-force weapon, where, for example, the NCI-designated cancer centers are out of network as a way to make sure that people with cancer don't sign up for your plan … or don't last long on your plan if they do. (Did I say that out loud?)

Do I sound like I suffer from a brutal lack of trust? Yes, I do—and I was just role-playing there an employee probably pretty accurately.

Most of us remember the HMO a-go-go years when your PCP was an administrative gatekeeper and you had to see them to get a specialist appointment—except you never could see them. Wait times were weeks or months, obviously by design, right?

But this way-too-expensive PPO model is the devil I know because, even if it totally sucks, it's better than the conspiracy theories and/or accurate or exaggerated recollections of other options.

Here are my recommended next steps. Listen to the shows with Vivek Garg, MD, MBA (

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