Creating a New Healthcare

We know that healthcare is broken, but how, exactly? And why is it that nothing seems to be helping? Well, as Chris Deacon says in this honest, open interview, “Until the chassis of healthcare is rebuilt…what we put on top of it is always going to be fundamentally broken.”  Chris Deacon is a legal expert, a healthcare activist, and an author. Her most recent book, The Great American Healthcare Heist: Why We’re Paying More and Getting Less seeks to demystify the broken nature in order to help the recipients of that care…us…look at the world through a different lens. She believes that the one stop gap we haven’t yet employed in our efforts to change healthcare is the power of the American people and their vote, but they have to first understand the systemic reasons why healthcare is broken.  Chris Deacon is a distinguished consultant in employer-sponsored healthcare, advocating for cost-effective strategies that benefit both employers and employees. As a seasoned national speaker and a reliable source for industry publications, she stands out for her integrity and impactful content in healthcare discussions. Deacon’s tenure at the New Jersey Department of Treasury was notable for implementing cost-saving measures exceeding $3 billion, reflecting her commitment to fiscal responsibility and healthcare quality. Her leadership at VerSan Consulting, LLC is marked by innovative solutions that have significantly reduced healthcare expenditures.

See, Believe, Create. Could it be so simple? Our guest today believes so. Dr. Tom Frieden has spent his entire career working public health, and in his estimation, these three words hold the key to better health for our communities, our world, and ourselves. It’s, as he says, a formula. In our conversation, Dr. Frieden shares tangible examples of how this formula has been applied successfully, and what changes we need to make as a country and society to achieve more affordable, more effective healthcare. Author of the book, The Formula for Better Health: How to Save Millions of Lives—Including Your Own, which distills four decades of public health leadership into a clear, actionable framework to prevent unnecessary deaths, Dr. Frieden is also the founder and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a global health organization that accelerates action against the world’s deadliest health threats. Resolve to Save Lives has worked with governments and other partners in more than 60 countries to save millions of lives. Dr. Frieden previously served as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and New York City Health Commissioner, where he led efforts that increased life expectancy by 3 years and helped end major health crises including the largest US outbreak of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic, and responses to H1N1, Zika, and other threats.

As an industry, we’ve been circling around the idea of value-based care for the past decade. But, did it ever occur to anyone to ask real people, the recipients of said care, what they thought or felt about that term? Turns out, they hate it.  Through focus groups and a step-by-step methodology, Natalie Davis and her team at United States of Care are redefining value-based care and many other critical issues in healthcare. The new branding, “Patient First Care” doesn’t just come with a new logo and look; it’s the language that can help policymakers get the bills that support this financial framework passed. Imagine that…listening to people, taking their feedback seriously, and crafting legislation that reflects what matters to them. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Our guest today is Natalie Davis, the co-founder and CEO of United States of Care, a nonpartisan organization working to ensure everyone has access to quality, affordable health care. She has nearly two decades of experience shaping health policy, including serving at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the rollout of historic coverage expansions. She was recently recognized as one of Washingtonian’s “500 Most Influential People of 2025”

Do you have an Apple watch? Fitbit? Oura ring? Woop? Wearables have taken over in the past decade with claims that by constantly monitoring our heart rate, sleep, respiration, and activity, they can provide health data that can change your life. But is that really possible? Or even plausible? Marco Benitez, former professional athlete, and the Founder and CEO of ROOK joins us on the Living Well series today to talk all things wearables. He sees tremendous potential with how the data these tools compile can be utilized across all aspects of our lives, including in our cars (!), to change our behavior. But he acknowledges there’s a catch. Many of these companies use the data collected not for YOUR benefit, but for theirs, and real change, well, there’s no magic bullet. It’s hard, takes time, and is all on you. Raised in Mexico with an insatiable curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit, Marco Benitez built his career at the intersection of health, technology, and sports science. Starting as a Tae Kwon Do champion, Marco’s discipline and resilience guided him into biomedical engineering, then into high-stakes roles in pharmaceutical giants like Roche and Novartis. Here, he witnessed the transformative power of data in healthcare—and saw a profound opportunity to make health metrics more accessible and actionable. Determined to improve health management and bridge the gap between raw data and real impact, Marco co-founded ROOK.

The only device we’re with every day, all the time is our phones. And yet, we often travel to outpatient clinics, pay significant copays, and engage physicians once or twice a year to run tests on our bodies. What if we could do all of that with our phone? Jason Moore, Founder and CEO of Spren, joins us on the podcast to talk about the premise behind Spren, a company that helps you turn your phone into a validated health lab. Formed out of his own challenges with gut health and gallbladder issues, Jason believes that no matter where we are on the health continuum, the process for getting closer to longevity and vitality is the same. Assess – Create a plan – Implement the plan – Reassess – Tweak the plan. It’s the microchanges, he asserts, those that are small but that consistently repeated that are most likely to get you (and him) from there…to where you want to be.

It’s always interesting when your podcast producer comes to you and says she thinks the innovations we’re featuring are sort of boring. Not exactly what you want to hear, but smart leaders take feedback like that and ask the question “Why is that?”  On today’s episode of Creating a New Healthcare, I invite that same producer, Jess Greenwood, who has herself worked in and around healthcare for over 25 years to join the show and talk about why the work we’ve featured recently feels boring and how that might just be the answer to transforming healthcare. Listen in on this lively discussion and the conclusions we come to about what’s really required moving forward and why boring may just be beautiful.

On average, employers are unnecessarily wasting $4,000 per employee per year on healthcare benefits and associated costs. For a mid-size company of 100 employees, that’s $400,000! EACH YEAR! Our guest today sat on the broker side of the business and saw the waste, fraud, and abuse at every level. As he says, “It’s like working with a CPA that gets paid by the IRS.” After getting fired for being too hard on an insurance plan on behalf of his customer, Donovan had an epiphany and started Health Compass Consulting to do things the right way. Since the company’s founding in 2018, Donovan and his team have saved their customers an average of $1,856 per employee per year while often improving those employees’ healthcare options. Donovan is a leading voice on healthcare reform and strategic employee benefits management. He is the author of the new book, ‘Fixing Healthcare: How Executives Can Save Their People, Their Business, and the Economy,’ that comes out November 12th and the Validation Institute 2025 Benefits Advisor of the Year.

A Zen practice is not something we typically associate with a Washington insider and healthcare lobbyist. But, our guest today has not only made that his personal mission, but his new book, The Zen Lobbyist, makes the argument that mindfulness might be the way we truly transform healthcare.  Despite the division that’s pervasive in American politics today, Gary maintains that what he calls the “mindful edge” is actually the way to cultivate unity. To lead with mindfulness means recognizing that stillness is a strategy and that compassion can actually be influence. The success of Gary’s career is its own testament to the effectiveness of these techniques.  For more than three decades, Gary has worked at the intersection of policy, payer, and provider strategy, helping shape national reforms at VillageMD, Care Centrix, and PwC, while advising top policy leaders and decision-makers on bipartisan solutions for value-based care.

Despite the almost universal agreement that the United States healthcare system needs to move to value-based care, forward progress on that movement has all but stalled. Why? A big driver…no surprise…are the contracts. Brian Overstreet, the Co-Founder of Arbital Health, has built an impressive AI-powered platform that combines both an unprecedented depth of data with actuarial expertise to provide transparency in value-based care contracts, helping providers and now, payers, see where they’ve gone awry in real-time so they can course correct quickly and effectively. Brian is a serial entrepreneur with two exits in his twenty-year experience who has launched a number of successful SaaS companies in the healthcare market. He is the Co-Founder, President, and CEO of Arbital Health which was just launched in 2023 but has already undergone two rounds of funding totalling ~$46 M in investment.

How many grams of protein do you need to be healthy? What about fiber? Supplements? It feels like we’re changing our diets daily to adhere to constantly shifting recommendations and none of it is really working to optimize our health. Christopher Gardner, Professor of Medicine in Nutrition Science at Stanford University, and featured advisor on the Netflix show, “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment”, joins us today to talk about how the industry is stacked against us and why the solution to our diet woes is as simple as beans, peas, and lentils. For more than 30 years Christopher Gardner, PhD, has studied what to consume and to avoid for optimal health, and how best to motivate individuals to achieve healthy dietary behaviors. He recently completed a two-year term serving on the US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and is the past chair of the American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee. He has conducted and published dozens of human nutrition intervention trials, including trials of Mediterranean, Ketogenic, Vegan, Low-Fat and Low-Carb diets and their effects on cardiometabolic health. Some of his current interests include Stealth Nutrition, Unapologetic Deliciousness and Institutional Food Settings. He is currently working on personalized nutrition explorations with several colleagues, with particular focus on the gut microbiome.