Special edition of On/Offcall!

🚨Today, I’ve got some huge news: I sat down with Mark Cuban to discuss how he’d restore sanity to our broken healthcare system if he were in change, and what every physician can do right now to take back control!

You can find the link to the full interview here.

This is the interview I’ve wanted to do the most since launching How I Doctor. Mark might not be a doctor, but it’s clear that he actually gives a damn about fixing healthcare and — more importantly — is trying to do something about it. 

I’ve been following closely as Mark turned the pharmacy world upside down with Cost Plus Drugs by cutting out middlemen and adopting a radically transparent approach to pricing. I had a hunch Mark might be into what we’re building at Offcall, and boy was I right! Mark shared two big ideas during our conversation that couldn’t be more perfectly aligned with our mission:

1. He thinks physicians are underpaid and getting screwed, and that we should start criminalizing the worst practices from insurance companies and hospitals…

2. If physicians band together to create a virtual network (hi, Offcall!), we can take back power, start getting paid more, and get back to doctoring.

To me, hearing this validation from someone like Mark proves that the movement we’re building around transparency is starting to catch fire. One by one, physician by physician, we’re creating something together at Offcall that truly has the potential to shape the future of our profession. I also want to say thank you to each of you. Mark didn’t just want to talk to me — he wanted to talk to our whole community, and he was excited to hear how fast we’re growing!

I’m including a few of my favorite quotes below — but there’s so much more. We spoke for almost two hours, and there wasn’t a hot topic we didn’t touch on: physician pay, prior auths, AI, PBMs, insurance company abuses, Shark Tank, and yes, even the Luka trade for all you sports fans. I highly recommend you listen to the entire conversation:

Here’s the link to the episode, and here you can find my social post about it on LinkedIn here.

Please: I’d love your help spreading the word and making sure every physician in the U.S. sees this interview! Share/engage with my post on social media, and also drop your thoughts in the comments after you listen. You can also feel free to forward this newsletter to any of your colleagues. If you reply back directly with your thoughts, I’ll respond as well.

Thanks so much and a huge congrats to the Offcall community — YOU made this happen and we’re just getting started!

Graham Walker, MD, Emergency Physician

Co-founder, Offcall

The Spiciest Moments From My Conversation With Mark

This week on How I Doctor, we talked with Dr. Kenneth Qiu - a board-certified family physician and the founder of EuDoc Direct Primary Care.

On physician pay: Doctors must be paid more money

“Let me just tell you, doctors are underpaid. When I look at individual bills like a heart transplant, $25,000, amount paid to the doctor: $2,200. If I’m getting a heart transplant, I want that motherf*cker doctor to make $10,000 so he or she’s paying attention and not worried about getting to the next heart transplant or worried about the patient that's got a booboo.”

On prior authorizations: Time to do away with them

"It's designed to drive doctors crazy. But here’s the real reason: If you have a billion dollars a year, let's just say you work through prior auths and you just extend them as long as you can, 4% of that is a shitload of money, that's $40 million. If you're a bigger insurance plan, it's 10 billion and now it's $400 million. So if I can keep a bunch of doctors pissed off at me, but I'm making an extra $400 million, what am I going to do?”

On insurance companies: Criminalize their worst practices that screw doctors

“The insurance companies are the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst. If you look at how insurance plans are designed, it should be criminal. It’s the antithesis of trying to optimize for patient care.”

On hospitals: Ban them from charging “facility fees”
“Now the hospitals have to game the system and are playing all kinds of games on how they overcharge. So you've got facility fees… Anybody who complicates the program, who complicates the economics, takes responsibility for at least at some level being the bad guy in all of this.”

On medical schools: “If you put me in charge…” Make them all free

“Would it be worth making med school free so you truly get the best of the best as opposed to the best of the people who can either afford it or are willing to take on the debt? If you put me in charge, I'm like $24 billion is nothing, but it changes the dynamics considerably to improve the quality of care.”

On private equity in medicine: Time for physicians to create a virtual hospital

“If you're able to aggregate enough doctors, you can create a virtual hospital network. What's the value of a big insurance company to a hospital or doctor? … Instead of being in the networks, I would organize and take that as far as you can. Put together a network and make your prices aggressive.”

Listen to the episode →

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Learn more and sign up here

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