YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Bertolini

lines on the record: 129
first: 2025-08-19
most recent: 2025-08-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I had no pain for a month. And then all of a sudden, one night I woke up in the middle of the night, felt like somebody had set my hand on fire. And I went on a journey that until the end of 2022, I was in level seven to ten pain sleeping one hour a night for 18 years.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does it matter how much your employees know those patients? Well, what do you mean? Because I worked in Alzheimer's ward. My mother ran a string of nursing homes. And what I found in working with them is if you spent the time to understand how they behaved and you got them to talking about something they were interested in, you could find a way into them that would make them much calmer. You knew how to talk to them to do it. But I was there for three years in that unit. So I said, if you kept employees for three years and they were able to help your patients be much better and reduce falls and anger and combativeness, would that be worth your money? And they did it and it worked. It's not about what's the data to tell us. It's how can we understand the data in a way that allows us to do this effectively and not break the bank.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's ask ourselves what are the top five risks of making this happen. Let's rank them by priority and let's stand back as a team and say, given this set of risks, do we believe as a leadership team that we can do this well and still make money? I said if we believe it, then it will happen. And so that's what we did. And so we put together a whole website for employers and I would get phone calls from all these employers all over the country saying, help me walk through this, help me understand why. One of them was a family-owned string of memory centers and they had employees that were making $12 an hour and they wanted to raise their wage. They said, but we're in the business of getting reimbursement for people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. And it's hard. And I said, well, what's your biggest cost? False. Hospitalizations. How's that cost? Anger, combativeness.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good joke. The spreadsheet is the worst invention ever created from business. If you read the book, it was The Terrorism of Excel or something like that I put in that book. But we've created a tool that allows us to manipulate numbers on the page to get the answer we want. And then we actually managed to it. We actually create a belief system that's not real. And then we manage to it. Instead of saying, what are the five risks on this page? And this is what we did on the wage thing. Okay, here's all the hard benefits. Let's take all the soft benefits. presenteeism, better attitude at work, empathy for our members. Let's put all those on a page and let's discount them by 90%. And so when we did that, the group that we discounted by 90% added up to the exact same amount of savings as we had in the hard savings, which we didn't discount. And actually what it meant was, is that we were just not seeing far enough. And then what I said to the team is let's not work by what the spreadsheet tells us.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just not going to happen. Cool idea, but no. And then it just took off, and all of a sudden we were spending $12,530 million more a year. And our stock price goes from $39 share up to $80. Because we then gave permission for our employees to care for our members like we were caring for each other. And my last five years at ATNA were joyful because I didn't have to tell people to get to Sandy Hook to help families with critical incident streft disease briefing. It all just happened. We were like a company on a mission. And that's how that Eastern practice has just changed my company.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On January 2nd of 2015, and I announced it in front of 240 of our 340 million shares and said, we're going to do this. I didn't ask the board because he said, well, how did your board let you do it? I said, well, this is one of those things where you ask for forgiveness and not for permission. And I just went ahead and did it. I got applause. Our employees all of a sudden realized that we could help one another. And we started doing other things. And I never had to do another suggestion. We doubled our tuition assistance. We paid back student loans up to $10,000 a year. We did pet therapy in all of our offices. And the only time I ever said no was when we went beyond dogs, cats, gerbils, and rabbits, somebody wanted to bring in mini ponies. I said, we're not bringing ponies in.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the CFO goes, Oh my God, this could kill us. We put the $16 in, and then one of my other executives came to me and said, you know, when you raise their wages, their coverage on their benefits is going to change because they're making more money because we graduated. I paid as CEOs 65% of my medical costs, premiums and everything else where the frontline employees who were at $12 were paying like 20%. So what we did is we said, okay, there's 7,100 employees. Why don't we take these employees and say to them, if you are below 300% of the federal poverty level, we'll have an independent firm adjudicate that and just say yes or no, I will eliminate all of your out-of-pocket health care costs if you join the wellness programs that are specific to your current needs. So I did this program. It was $75 million the first year. I was at the JPMorgan conference.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“working two jobs they got their kids on Medicaid because they can't afford the company's dependent coverage they got people on food stamps they're calling bill collectors while they're in break you're not paying them enough so I read these things I'm going wow I'm the jerk here and I'm now CEO so I bring in my head of human resources who I ultimately had to let go said I want to know who these people are I want to know what their life's like how much they make and it was about 12 bucks an hour 81 were women 20 of the families were on food stamps 25 of the kids were in Medicaid because they couldn't afford to pay coverage this is crazy here we are a company that's come out of being almost out of business to being profitable we've got to do something about it so I said to her I want to know what we can do for these employees I want to raise their minimum wage so we started in 50 cents I said this is just not enough let's go to 16 bucks”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All sorts of amazing things. Our healthcare costs went down, not trend. The actual dollar cost went down 7.5% the next year. So I said, we got to let every employee do this. So we opened it to employees. During work, they got the time out to do it, go the classes, and one day Mari walks in the house and she hands me the journals. And she goes, okay, Mr. Big Shot CEO, you ought to read those journals. I said, why? She goes, because the problem with their stress is you.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yoga classes. And Mari, my then partner, but was my wife for a while. Mari was the teacher. And she worked with Gary Krasow at Minnie Yoga, and they taught these classes. And after 12 weeks, what we found is that the people in the highest quintile of stress spent $2,500 more a year on healthcare than the average employee. So we put everybody through these programs. We had them journal. And after 12 weeks, heart rate variability cortisol levels dropped 50% in this population.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More revved up than the East Coast. And I don't know if the avocado prices were up or whatever, but somehow there were like more wiggled out than the East Coast. And we did 12 weeks of mindfulness.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's this model of thinking differently about your place in the world and what you do. So then I go to work one day. I say, you know what? I think we ought to do yoga for our employees. And I'm the president of the company and everybody's sitting there and goes, oh, sure, boss, that's a great idea. The chief medical officer follows me to my office. He goes, You know, this is voodoo medicine. I said, Lonnie, no, it's not. It's not voodoo medicine. What do I need to do to prove it to you? Said we need to do a double blind study, so we do a bicoastal, double blind study. We have employees sign up. We had 795 employees sign up bicoastally. We did cortisol levels and heart rate of variability of all those employees. And it was interesting. The West Coast people were actually more...”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meditating. And there are four limbs of yoga of meditation, so there's eight total limbs. The ultimate being Samadhi. You're one with everything. You move back to the one. You find the Creator. And it's built on a model of that in the beginning, the Creator existed and only it existed. And upon realizing that there was no awareness of it unless there were others, it unfolded upon itself to create the world or the world, so many there are so that those people through a fog could find their way back to the Creator and learn the lessons of being the one that were all just one thing. We're all the same. And so my mantra, which is across the back of my neck, is so hum in Sanskrit. It means I am that and everything is me. It's all just one. And if you can keep that in mind, when you're with others, you and I are one.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Science of yoga, and it relates it to Western medicine. And I'm going, this really makes sense. So I started reading the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads and the Prattavijanahardayam and all these other sorts of things and started to realize this is just rich. And that yoga is not, in the United States, it's this physical practice, but it's actually understanding the teachings, yama's niamas, how you treat others and how you treat yourself. There's five of them each. They come into ten. And the first one is treat others as you would treat yourself written 50,000 years ago, not 2,000 years ago. Codified the Ten Commandments. Written 50,000 years ago. And then there's the physical practice, asana, the movements initiated by breath called pranayama. And all of that is to still the body and the mind in a way where you can sit in an extended period of time.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She got the rhythm because the cerebral spospinal fluid is like a heartbeat inside of you. It moves up and down around your spinal cord and your brain all day long. And if you can establish that rhythm again, which might have been distorted by the accident, you can be better. I'm feeling better doing that. I start reading about this procedure and then this therapist says to me, you should try yoga because I couldn't run anymore because I was too unstable. I said, yoga's for girls. She goes, oh no. And she said, just give me again. Give me four visits. I'll show you. And she was a yoga teacher. And like after the first one, I could barely move the next day from my first set of asanas. And I started doing it more. And I was doing it on my own. I said, you know, there's more to this than just the physical practice. And so I started reading about the American vinyoga institute. And there was this great book by Leonard Pearl Malter called The Heart.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is that? And I read about it, and it's subtle manipulation of your bones and your head and your sacrum to reestablish a rhythm in your cerebral spinal fluid. And I had ripped my dural sheath and all this sort of stuff with the accident so everything was torquing inside of me. So I said, how does this work? I go in, I get on the table and this woman puts her hands on my head and on my table and all of a sudden she goes, give me just four visits. After four visits, I started coming off all my drugs.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The drugs didn't touch the pain, they just let me not care about it was the way it worked. And so I'm like, I can't do this. I'm sitting on the side of the freeway in Hartford in my 740 IL getting ready to run into a bridge abutment, police officers middle of the night, because I used to get up in the middle of the night and just drive around like a madman and trying to get police to stop me. They never did. But what I'm sitting on the shoulder, they stop me. They come over and go, what's going on? So I'm thinking about running my car to that bridge. And they're looking, I got a brace on my neck, my arms in a thing. And they go, what's going on with you? I told them a story and I said, get in the car. They drive me home. They take the keys. They take my license. I said your spouse can pick this up tomorrow. But you're not to drive again. It's too dangerous. Just let alone whether or not you're going to hurt yourself. You're going to hurt somebody else. So I was at Wits End. And so this friend of mine used to try cranial psychotherapy. And I'm going.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I get injured, I'm on seven different narcotics every day. Everything sounded like Charlie Brown's mother in the cartoons when she would talk was always, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's all I heard. What world was that? I was so hyped, but I was still incredible pain.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Eric's in the house. He has this radiation. It's the most frightening thing. I panicked the first time. He went in a room with a 12 inch walls and he's wearing these plates over as lungs to protect them. They irradiate them. With Hiroshima bomb kind of radiation five days straight to kill every piece of bone marrow in his body. Killed it all. So he can't survive without it. And so one day I walk in and he's got this woman doing Reiki therapy on him. And she's doing Reiki. She's not touching him, right? They're hovering this energy thing. And he goes, dad, this feels great. And I'm sitting next to him. I'm going, stop touching you. He goes, Dad, it feels great. So I lay on the bed and she goes, would you like to try? And so she starts up with me. And after about five minutes, I go.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were sitting in this other restaurant one day. It was the Gold Rock diner in Hartford, and we're sitting there. He's a theoretical physicist. He's talking about the absence of time and the concept of physics. And I'm talking about the absence of time in the Hindu belief system. Everything that's ever happened is happening now. We are just too limited in our intelligence to understand it. We don't see it. We can't see it. And we're talking back and forth on these different concepts. And he goes, yeah, but mine's science based. I said, mine's two. It's science-based. There's this father sitting with his five-year-old at the table next to us, and I get up to leave. Eric's already headed out to the bikes. And he grabs my arm and he goes, is this something I have to look forward to? I said only if you're lucky.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broke my neck. I tell him the story. And he goes, You made a deal, didn't you? Send me a picture. And so he started praying for me. He says, you're going to be fine. And so we're talking. He goes, Dan, why are we both still here? Why does this matter? And I told him to grasp Tyson thing. I was out of a trillion different genetic combinations. There's only 100 billion people on this earth. We won the lottery. So let's make good use of it. I said, but I don't know what's in it for you, but you can't screw it up because I'm just spare parts. And by the way, you can't have the other kidney until I'm gone. Gave him the left kidney. I said to him, You have to drink bud long next because that's what it was raised on. Don't start changing the grease that runs in the chain.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My neck. There was a friend of mine who was praying for Eric at the wailing wall in Jerusalem took his picture every day, put it in the wailing wall, and prayed for him. While he was sick, and he called me and he said, how's it going? I said, well, Eric's doing well.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Eric and I, after that, he and I used to ride motorcycles together. We went down to Rolling Thunder and did all sorts of cool stuff and we're riding around on the bikes one day and we're sitting at the bar and he looks at me and he goes, Dad, why are we both here? Because he came home on February 18, 2003. I broke my neck on February 18th, 2004. So we went into hospice. I went down to the chapel, took the scapular offer on my neck, the rosary from around my neck, the rosary out of my pocket, put it on the altar and said me for him. And having been trained by Jesuits in my career, we were always taught to be of right mind to make good decisions, not to make bargains with God. And at that moment, I made the bargain. I said, let me have his disease, let me have his pain, let him live. I've lived a great life. He comes home on February 18, 2003, February 18, 2004, I hit a tree.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kidneys were damaged, so he got my left kidney two years later because I had the best match for a kidney. And then they did it laparoscopically. Then they didn't have to cut you in half like they used to. They put two holes up here in a slot down here and they went in. They cut it off and it fell into the slot and the doctor pulled out of the slot and I was on the next day. So it was an overnight stay.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, none of that works. We're in space that nobody knows. He's starving. He's allergic to soy, so he can't give him intralipids to help him come back. There's got to be an intralipid somewhere in the world that's not omega-3 fatty acid, not soy. And so one of the residents runs off and calls her nutritional professor at John Hopkins. He says, oh yeah, there's a thing called Omega Ven. It's Omega-3 fatty acid in Austria. And she comes back. I found one, but it's not FDA approved. So go see the FDA. How can I get my son this drug? There's these three pages you fill out. It's called a single patient, compassionate use exception. Have the doctors fill it out, call us, and we'll approve it. They approved it. It was made by Fresinius. The Fresinius CEO was in Austria. He brought it back with him to Boston. We gave it to my son, and four weeks later his hair started growing back.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking to NIH doctors on the website about his disease and what to do next. And they tried over and over and over again to get me to do a do not resuscitate because they said, your son's just not going to make it. He was not able to eat. He went from 140 pounds to 80 pounds. He was starving. It was horrible. His hair fell out. It was just a mess. And he was bleeding out his total body volume of blood every day through his bottles. He had gastric dysplasia. And there were times when I gave my own blood because we're the same blood type to help him get the blood he needed, but he was getting almost his whole body volume for weeks and weeks and weeks. So they came into the room one day. We need to talk to you. He's not going to make it. We need to put him in hospice. So I went in and sat down with him and said, Eric, game over. We did the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary together, and he went into hospice. And I was meeting with the medical team that morning. I didn't have my Harrison's internal medicine tech store on my laptop. And they said, where's your stuff?”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happen to be my brother Peter, who's the third in the line. John's 11 months behind me, Peter's 10 months behind John. So we're the Irish triplets 21 months apart. And Peter was the perfect mismatch. So Peter graciously gave up his bone marrow for Eric. We put Eric into radiation. We zapped him where he had no ability to live after his final radiation period unless he got my brother's bone marrow. Put the bone marrow in, killed the cancer. We're getting ready to go home. Graversus host disease hits him and we're in the hospital for a year fighting a horrible scenario. Graf vs disease, the skin starts to come off, your gut sloughs off, you can't eat. It's just terrible stuff. And so I'm in the hospital. I'm living in his room with them. I'm sleeping in his room. Made him bring a bed in. I am meeting with the medical team for an hour every morning, going through my Harrison's internal medicine text and sticky notes. I've got a pub med and we're”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My son had T cell gamma delta lymphoma. Only 34 people all men had ever been diagnosed with it. He was the youngest at 16, and it had a six month end date. That was totally only lived six months. I said, well, not me. So I quit my job. And I took him around with my wife and we went around to meet all of these physicians. And there was this physician, Ava Ginan, at Boston Children's Hospital, said deadly disease. Nobody ever survives us. I've never seen one. They're so rare. But I got an idea. If we create graph versus host disease, which is a bad bone marrow transplant, it will attack the T cells, which are cancerous in your son's body. If we can kill all the T cells, we can kill the cancer. But then he's going to survive graverse's host disease, where the body goes to war with the bone marrow that we put in that isn't his bone marrow. So finding the right mismatch.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as my Eastern belief system says, we just change our form and go to a different place as a result of death. It's not the end of your energy and existence in the universe.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go, what we found is at Aetna, we tried this, and I remember when I brought it into the office and they all looked at me and said, you're going to break the company's back. I said, let's not require them to give up hope for curative services. Let's allow them not to have to say they are going to die in a short period of time. And let's just let them go into hospice early. It was amazing. It went from 18% of people being in hospice before to 75% of people going into hospice. The letters we got from people about how amazing the final days were and how much better it was when they weren't hanging out in a waiting room waiting for a doctor to tell them what's next and the cost was 75% lower and end of life so changing the rules about how we do these things AI can help us in these places there are just certain things that are just not going to end well”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had to put my son in hospice July 15th, 2002. And it was a horrible decision to make. I had to give up hope. I had to say he's no longer curable and that we just need to wait for him to die. And he went into his hospice room. And then I found a drug for him. And he came to me and said, you know, your son has to come out of hospice if you apply this drug. I said, let's see. Dad maybe living. I think I'll take the maybe living road. He can go back to his room and we'll work there. And so what we found was that in hospice, end of life where 60% of your lifetime costs are spent. Medicare rules and most rules and most insurance companies require you to say, I can no longer seek curative services and I have to give I have to say I'm going to die in a certain period of time.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the family looks at the doctor in the waiting room when they walk in and go, what can we do next, doctor? The doctor never really wants to say, well, I think it's time to let this person go. They want to say, okay, well, we could try this, or we could do that. We often get those prior authorization requests when the patient is at end of life. And the reason is because they're stuck in the medical industrial complex.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look for two things in executives curiosity and courage. The curiosity to continue to ask questions and learn more every day and the courage to act on it when you have a hypothesis that might be powerful. And that's where I think that could help. I think in better informed consumers about how healthcare works and what their options are is a far better world than just deferring. There are a lot of times we have cases, and I've been in these situations where a patient is dying.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for a long, long time, we deferred to our clinicians and said, you know, whatever you think I ought to do, Doctor, I want to do. And really what we should understand is that the best prepared clinicians in the world today are people who just got out of their residency. They know all the latest science. If they were to read two journal articles every night for a year, by the time the year passed, it would be five years behind on the latest literature in healthcare. So how did they keep up? particularly for an internist. I mean, it's almost impossible. And so this idea of using AI as a way of gathering information and giving you insights, I always say to people, the mental model that exists inside your head about how the world works is the most critical tool you have. And if you don't constantly add new information to it and are not a continual learner, you can't possibly know what you need to know to make good decisions. And so I...”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Live in that space. I've lived right in that place my whole career. I am an iconoclast. I never fit in with the CEO club. I'm an iconoclast.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Individual buys My money, not some employer who's trying to manage a whole group of people or a small employer who can't manage their own health care costs because they've got so few people, it should be the individual saying, here's what I want out of the healthcare system. And then ultimately the healthcare system will have to align. But those actors are all going to fight against one another. And there's a quote I have had under my blotter every day of my working career. I'm fascinated with Renaissance Italy. And it was Niccolo Machiavelli when he wrote to the prince there's nothing more dangerous to affect than should you initiate a new order of things because those who are managed by the current order have the laws behind them and experience to continue to support the way it is. And for those who would be advantaged by the new order of things, really won't embrace it until they experience it. And between the two, you are in great danger.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economic models are physicians 760,000 or so all work on a cash basis. That's their accounting model. The hospital systems and the facilities that provide healthcare around the country work on a revenue basis. As long as they have enough revenue coming in, I can win. And then you have insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and biomedical research companies and DME and all these other companies that work on a margin basis. And so you have 760,000 physicians cash basis. You have 6,900 hospitals and add probably another 6,900 facilities as well. So almost 13,000 that work on a revenue basis. Then you've got Act 1300 insurance companies and add up all the others that are on a margin basis. And you put those economic models together, it's a wonder people get care at all. And so when you look at that discontinuity, it really should be the other way around.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now by state, it's almost impossible in some cases to deal with the way these regulators behave because they're contradicting one another. Like the abortion issue, you get penalized as a national carrier if Missouri absolutely forbids abortions and it's an employee who works for an employer in another state that offers them. You get penalized. There's a fine for every case. And so you have all of these things that you need to navigate from a regulatory standpoint. It would be far better if we just said to the states, you run your own exchange and your own markets for your people in that market and we'll be able to make this work across the country. So we have all of these Internecian warfare going on between the states and the federal government over how you spread the costs of this. So that's an issue. The third one is just there are a whole bunch of actors in the system. So if you look at the way the”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Size has an impact. We only have 2 million people. And we took care of 54 million people around the world. And so it's a different issue. But size has an advantage as well. We have the A team on this product for these people every day. That's a subsidiary in most of the other companies who didn't take the time to understand it. Some companies are pulling out of the market because they use their commercial networks instead of narrow networks because they didn't really pay attention to it because they had their C team on it instead of the A team. So size has, it's a double-edged sword. We think about this every day. We innovate against it every day. We know it could be bigger. We're larger employer, larger competitors have a lot of other businesses to pay attention to like Medicare Advantage. So that's one set. The other is the regulatory framework. We have 51 regulators. 50 states and the federal government. And we have to try and react with them all. And as you see with changing regulation.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's called choice, but that got pulled out by the Senate. Because of the tax effect of HSAs for all those benefits. But those benefits are being tax advantaged for employers now anyway. So it really shouldn't be scored that way. But that's the way they scored it. So it saved $30 billion, so they pulled it up.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be resistance at the large end employers, they have benefit staffs of hundreds of people. This person buys pharmacy, this person by dental, and they just manage the whole process. You don't need all those people when you give the money to the employees and say, hey, go buy your own health insurance. And that's going to be one resistance. There are consultants that advise large employers and get paid a fee every year. That goes away. Brokers who think they're disadvantaged by it can help us with the employees picking the right plan. So we can help preserve that model for them. And then there's just going to be the regulation required to make the changes. So in Indiana, we've already made the changes to allow ICRA to occur from the standpoint of that state. We need it on a national basis. It was in the original bill that came out of the House. It was called choice, which I think is a better name than ICRA because Icaris doesn't sound...”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spreading the risk of the sicker people in the population across a larger set of numbers makes it more effective from a risk management standpoint. A pregnancy can't blow up your rate next year because that can spread across the whole population. So the idea is better risk management, equalizing the risk across the population. And then secondly, having freedom of choice on what I get and what I buy. Now there will be limits. It doesn't mean people can take their defined contribution, put it in account, and spend it on beer. They actually have to buy health insurance or health care in some way, shape or form. So we don't want people taking unnecessary risks, but saying, oh, here's a great pot of gold from my employer. I'm going to spend it in a different way. They have to use it to provide that benefit.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can reduce their costs and keep them sustainable over time. But we have an example right in front of us that works. So $79 million there. There are 20 to 30 million gig workers who can't buy insurance through a group. But if we create our banking, the ability to set aside hourly rates that you then can aggregate at the month and buy your policy, that allows them access to the individual market. And then there are large employers who are looking at this as well that want to take first their part-time workers, but then ultimately over time more of their workers and put them into the system. That's another 80 to 100 million lives. So it's a massive market if we get everybody to move that way. Where every American gets the choice to pick my network, my benefit plan.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we think we can serve 125 million people. The last group of insured business on a group basis is middle market and small group employers. So small group employers are under 100 large group employers or middle market up to 1,000. And those people all buy insured products. They pay a premium to the insurance company and they get coverage back. That is a less effective system because those populations that they underwrite for those groups are anywhere from 10 employees to a thousand employees. And when you compare it to the individual market where we have 24.2 million people, the ability to manage a risk over larger populations isn't there for them. So they are subject to higher rate increases. There's 79 million of those people. So we believe that if we offered an ICRA product, an individual consumer health reimbursement account to those employers.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get paid by the plants who have less risk. We set aside money for risk adjustment clearance, and we do that throughout the year. We send out money to the government who then reallocates to people who didn't get paid as much as they should have.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncontrolled diabetic costs about $1,600 a month. A controlled diabetic can get down to $900 a month. There's $700 opportunity. So you can invest $699 and get a return out of it per month in that patient to make them better. So we put together a set of tools and capabilities that they can learn, including wearable glucose sensors that help them manage the care. And because we're digitally forward and people can learn and go at their own course and work with their doctor, we attract a population that's interested in being better. The people that join our plans want to get better every so often, four times a year now, we submit to the government all of our claims. And those all have risk adjustments on them, diagnosis codes, and treatments that were given, and then that's all compared to each health plan. And the health plans that have more risk as a result of that analysis.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working virtually, AI capabilities on a new platform that is lower cost than almost anybody else's allows us to put a very unique product in the marketplace. So one of our great products is for diabetes. We actually have a program where we encourage diabetics to join us, counterintuitive in the insurance industry, asking sick people who cost $1,600 to $1,700 a month to join your plan. But we know if we give them the tools and the capability and the understanding, they're going to get better. We're going to get the risk adjustment for it in the system, and we'll be able to take care of them and not have to rate them up as a result of what they've been going through.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools that they can use. So we have a chatbot we're about to launch that helps people understand their condition in a deep way. They can talk to it and get information and go back and forth with it. We have implemented almost two dozen large language models on the back end of the business that have reduced our operating cost. So we've been able to reduce costs and hold our prices at a lower place other than what we would have had we had these bigger costs. So it's a digital forward cloud native platform first new platform for health insurance that has been built since 1972. So everybody uses the old health edge platform. I've modified Health Edge three times in my career and was built in 72. Everybody has it pretty much. We have our own platform. Secondly, we have one version of the truth and data. So we can use large language models and AI at scale, which has huge advantage for us in the marketplace. So digital forward.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we currently cover about 2 million lives, and they're all ACA members, Affordable Care Act. They're all people who in some way, shape, or form, need to have subsidized health care that they otherwise could not afford. We're expanding to more markets as we speak.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, this whole idea of having the tools to allow people to be educated and make this choice will end that they can keep it because it's in their community. And as their circumstances change, they can fund that plan from another employer they go to or from the government, they can keep that network and that plan. All of a sudden, it's what I want and it's mine.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source