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What do golf, horses, and healthcare have in common?  Private equity, baby. And whether you're a patient, a practitioner, a player - or, goodness help you, all three - chances are you've experienced a change in service, quality, and delivery.  Buckle up, Wendy and Matt have a rant straight from the heart for this one. 

Will and Kristin Flanary are internet sensations as Dr. and Lady Glaucomflecken, posting hilarious and pointedly insightful videos about the physician and patient experience. What's less known is the how the families of patients and physicians share in those experiences along the way.  Kristin joins us to talk about her work advocating for humanity centered healthcare for all involved in the healt...

Reflection and introspection are not a daily practice for many of us. But would it be worth strengthening those skills if they helped mitigate moral injury?  Wendy and Matt discuss how such practice can keep everyday work grounded in our oaths and alert us to the earliest signals of a slide toward transgression.

Forced arbitration is the secret justice system you've never heard of, and it's likely working against you. Brendan Ballou, former DOJ prosecutor and author of When Companies Run the Courts: How Forced Arbitration Became America's Secret Justice System exposes these little known clauses hidden in practically every service agreement we sign, explains the harms they can create, and tells us when and...

Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling spent decades leading soldiers in combat and across cultures before he transitioned to healthcare leadership when he retired from the US Army. He joins us to talk about the professional parallels he's witnessed along the way: the oaths we take, the life and death situations, the bonding among colleagues, the importance of our institutions, and the betrayals...

Leadership matters.   Steve Edwards, former President and CEO of CoxHealth, a $2 Billion Missouri-based health system, joins us to talk about his 30 years of leadership in healthcare, and how he balanced the books while never losing sight of the mission.

Sebastian Junger is a master storyteller whose vast body of work speaks to our humanity and collectivism – loyalty, belonging, meaning, connection - and what we lose without them. Junger joins us to talk about what he's learned from war, history, and a near-death experience, and that whether as physicians or soldiers, we ultimately strive to live "in a world where human relations are entirely gove...

DPC. Concierge Care. Upselling services. Are these new models the answer? Wendy and Matt break down what these new approaches mean for physicians and patients and how overturning a section of the ACA may be the best place to start.

Dr. Victor Montori, Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic's KER Unit, and author of Why We Revolt , joins us to talk about his patient revolution and why 'deliberate' care is one of the strongest acts of defiance we can deploy against a broken healthcare system.

Investigative journalist Gardiner Harris joins us to talk about  No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, an explosive expose of an organization whose image as a ""child-friendly" baby company" contrasts against "reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions."

Our news feeds are rife with stories of betrayal, and as physicians, many of those stories feel shockingly familiar. We outline three levels of moral injury that can follow betrayal and offer strategies to prevent and mitigate that harm.

New job? Congrats!  Now go read the fine print in your contract.  Carefully.  Lawyer Dennis Hursh shares his decades of history and experience negotiating - or re-negotiating - physician contracts.

Legendary investigative journalist and NYT reporter Walt Bogdanich ( When McKinsey Comes to Town ) joins us to talk about his recent article " How Private Equity Oversees the Ethics of Drug Research"  and the broader impacts of what happens when outside financial firms influence internal business operations.

New year, new beginnings. We covered a lot of ground last year and we're going to keep up the pressure and keep fighting the good fight. Wendy and Matt discuss what and who they appreciated about last year's episodes, and what they're looking forward to in 2026.

Eight months ago, we followed along as Prospect Medical shuttered Crozer Health. In this episode, as promised, several of the doctors, nurses, medical assistants, elected officials and public servants we spoke to initially tell us how they have fared since. A few themes emerged: the unexpected domino effects when a hospital closes, the importance of community, trust, and transparency, the mismatch...

We promised to follow up on The Fall of Crozer Health and we'll drop our full episode on Monday. For anyone thinking of selling to private equity, you won't want to miss this.

Was dialysis the canary in medicine's coal mine of corporatization, as neoliberalism took hold in the US?  Tom Mueller, journalist and author of "How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death, and Dollars in American Medicine", joins us to talk about how dialysis became a "microcosm of American medicine" and what we can do to fix it.

We make a lot of changes that don't make much difference. Why? In this episode, Wendy and Matt borrow the perspective of rancher and regenerative agriculture proponent, Don Campbell, who said, " If you want to make small changes, change the way you do things. If you want to make major changes, change the way you see things".  We apply that big picture thinking to solutions-finding in healthcare.

In 2023, 82% of nurses had experienced at least one workplace violence incident, and nearly half were experiencing even more violence. And it's not just nurses. Surgeons, ER docs, primary care physicians and others know violence in healthcare is on the rise. Erin Pastore and Marie Lopresti, two ED nurses in Philadelphia, share their personal experiences with violence in their workplace, and how to...

As the former head of the State Health Benefits Program within New Jersey's Department of the Treasury - one of the largest public health plans in the country - Chris Deacon unmasked the machinery of healthcare and didn't like what she saw. Now a nationally recognized voice for health plan transparency and employer empowerment, Chris joins us to talk about her new book "The Great American Healthca...

You read that correctly.  Sometimes we have to look outside of medicine to be reminded why we love it so much. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning journalist Sam Quinones joins us to talk about "The Perfect Tuba", his new book about people creating something bigger than themselves, hard work, practice, dedication, and community.  Sound familiar?

Dr. Carlos Cardenas knows rock n' roll (and gastroenterology). A practicing physician in the Rio Grande Valley, Dr. Cardenas has been playing music for decades as a balm for his heart and soul, and as it turns out, for his patients.  In the words of Dr. Cardenas, when it comes to healing people, "music is at the core of it all".

Are we living in The Gilded Age of medicine? So many of the challenges we face in healthcare today are rooted in the motivations of the people holding the purse strings, and unfortunately for us (and our patients) those motivations aren't always aligned with the Hippocratic Oath.  Wendy and Matt dig into the history of corporate greed in this country, and how that history may be repeating itself.

Few medical dramas have resonated as deeply with physicians as HBO's  The Pitt.   Emergency physician Dr. Jacob Lentz, a medical consultant on the series, takes us behind the scenes of the critically acclaimed show and explains how - and why -  The Pitt gets ER medicine so right.   Credit: Audio clips from  The Pitt courtesy of HBO Max.

Healthcare is awash in data. A typical hospital generates 50 petabytes - a million gigabytes - of it each year. But what are we measuring, exactly? Where does that data go? Why is most of it wasted? And does what we're measuring really need to be measured? Wendy and Matt talk about modern medicine's growing obsession with big data, how data drives social behavior, and the questions we all must ask...