The $17B Aon-USI Deal & August Healthcare News | Last Month in Healthcare

"I look at it as an opportunity for everybody else. You're already seeing people on LinkedIn saying, I can't wait for the disruption." - Lamont Thurston, BeneRe In this episode of Last Month in Healthcare, Producer Nathaniel and I sat down with Lamont Thurston, founder and CEO of BeneRe, to break down the biggest healthcare news stories of August 2026. We started with Aon's $17 billion all-cash acquisition of USI, a deal that lit up LinkedIn for a week straight. KKR took USI private for $4.3 b

There are roughly 9,000 ambulatory surgery centers in the United States, and most of them aren't running at capacity. Ronen Elefant figured out that he didn't need to build another one; he just needed to reach the ones already sitting half empty. My guest this week is a trauma surgeon in Pennsylvania who has been flying his own plane to work for fourteen years. About a year ago he turned that into a business: rent time at an ASC, fly in, do the cases, fly home. One bundled price covering the fa

This episode was recorded live on LinkedIn with Bill Dembereckyj, CFO of Imagine360, and it's a look at renewal season from the seat that ultimately signs off on it. Bill walks through three real cases: a 250-life senior living facility staring at a 50% increase, an 85-life restaurant group facing a $450,000 jump, and a 140-life private school looking at 60%. We get into why CFOs are being brought in far too late, why Bill started his own plan renewal in Q1, and what happens when finance only

Whole genome sequencing costs about $1,000 today. Ten years ago it was fifteen. Clinical guidelines already say kids with epilepsy or developmental delay should be escalated to it, and more than half of them never are. My guest this week is Joshua Resnikoff, founder of Sunstone Health and a former bench scientist at Harvard. He came to this the hard way. His middle son started spiking 105-degree fevers at 18 months old, and it took three years and several pediatricians to name the condition. W

Half of what this pharmacy compounds is GLP-1s. The other half is a category most benefits professionals have never had to think about, and probably will within a few years. I got a tour of Optimal Balance Pharmacy's facility and sat down with co-owner Rick Manuel to talk through what peptides actually are, how the FDA's category two list works, and what happens if those compounds move to category one. We get into why BPC-157 has a better safety profile than ibuprofen and the mechanism behind

Everyone in this market is optimizing for the wrong thing. Consumers want the most weight loss for the cheapest price, and up to 40% of what they're losing is muscle. My guests this week are Nicholas Syhler, a former cardiologist who left his residency to work upstream of the heart attacks he was treating, and Paul Elsass, an exercise physiologist who spent years in startup land before landing on the one root cause nobody had solved. Their company, Embla, runs a coach-first GLP-1 program out o