The Company That Pays Surgeons Not to Operate | with Matt Eurey

"We pay them a $2,500 flat fee for the time that they spend with the patient and make that recommendation for no surgery. If you don't, then you've wasted their time." - Matt Eurey Most of healthcare is paid for volume, so employers end up paying for surgeries that never needed to happen. When RAND studied Carrum Health's data, about 30% of surgeries were avoided once the first step was checking whether the patient actually needed one. Matt Eurey ran benefits at Lowe's, which spent about a bil

"Over 90% of the time, there is some change recommended to the care path someone is on. Oftentimes we make two to four separate recommendations." - Peter Bridges, AccessHope Cancer is one of the largest cost drivers in any self-funded plan, and most of the strategies built to manage it focus on price. Peter Bridges argues the bigger lever is making sure the patient is on the right treatment in the first place. Only about 20% of cancer patients are treated at one of the country's 57 NCI-designa

Monique Burke buys more stop-loss than almost anyone in this business, and the rate is the last thing she looks at. She built OneDigital's stop-loss center of excellence starting with a spreadsheet, an offshore data team, and one other person. It's doubled year over year since. Now it covers everything from marketing a case through claims reimbursement, plus TPA and captive selection, because every time they solved one problem another piece of the stack turned out to be broken. We get into wha

Two kids called Brett Morris to tell him he saved their father's life. The man had cancer and had decided not to fight it. He'd spent his working life saving for their education and he wasn't going to spend it on himself. Samaritan Fund covered his care, he changed his mind, and he beat it. That's the business. Brett finds people facing catastrophic medical costs, sources third-party funds to cover their premiums and out-of-pocket maximum, and the employer's plan gets relief as a byproduct. He

"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