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

“There's a concern that sick people won't be well taken care of in that system. It's exactly the opposite. Consumers, when educated, can make a good choice because it's about them. It's just like medical care. I want my doctor to take care of me and what I want to accomplish in my medical care, not what the person on the front of men's fitness magazine looks like because I'm never going to be there. I was at one point, but only for a fleeting moment. And then it was gone.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What if I get to find contribution for my employer? What they're paying for me today, and I buy a plan that suits me at a better cost for the network and a plan design that works for my family using a plan selection tool, are you going to have a kid this year? Are you thinking about building your family? Are you going to have any surgeries that you need? You build your plan design to support that. You buy it. You have money left over most often. I can use that to pay those out-of-pocket costs instead of going to the bank. Or I can buy dental and vision life insurance or disability. All of a sudden it's my plan and it's my choice. It's what I want. Which Americans have in every other part of our economy. They buy what they want. They can see it online. They can make their own choices. So that's what we should do”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To gold, where I can pick my journey. And so if I can pick the right plan with my doctor in my hospital and I can keep it. Then I'm going to be willing to pay for it. Last year, two out of five Americans borrowed $74.9 billion to pay their out-of-pocket cost for healthcare from banks.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happens is a lot of those employees in that employer who didn't spend that kind of money pay 15% of a higher sum every year and don't have any control over the benefits and they get dissatisfied. Five years running, small group employers have been paying double digit rate increases. There's now just dropping coverage and saying to their employees, go find your own coverage. Go to the ACI. Let's make that a more thoughtful transition. Let's help employers go to define contribution. In the ACA, 75% of all providers are in the networks of some plan. All the plans develop narrow networks. So from our perspective, it's not about Oscar membership. It's about membership being able to pick their doctor and their hospital in a more price-effective way because it's not an employer buying a large network. It's a narrow network. There's narrow networks in every market. It's designed by market. And the benefit plan designs range from bronze.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economics of large networks are that they are inversely cost effective. The larger the network you have, the less stability you have to negotiate better rights. And the benefits, when you give an average benefit for employees, the employees have to decide which is the best for them they settle for whatever it is they get. And they have to pay 15% out of pocket. So in a small group employer, Small group employer with one pregnancy in a year will have a double digit rate increase every year. Because of a blessed event.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need to eliminate employer sponsored insurance And we need to say we're going to let individuals buy their own. Need a marketplace to do that, and that's what the ACA has created a marketplace where people can buy my network, my benefit plan for me and my family. Now we need to help them understand how to do that more effectively. It's a lot like when we went from define benefit to defined contribution in pensions. What should I invest in? How do I invest? It's all based on your age and your risk profile and what you need to retire in the future. How do we hit that target? And then use financial advisors. Our best opportunity is to have brokers help people understand what they can pick. The second part is that when employers buy insurance, they buy large networks because they have all these employees in multiple places and they give a range of benefits but only a few which fits the average of the employee.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Large part. So we now have employers who buy insurance for a large group of people providing a limited range of benefits that on average control the price of that benefit without really looking at the individual requirements underneath and what people need. And so people are stuck with more or less holding their nose and picking a plan that works for them, even though it's not something they would otherwise buy if they had the opportunity to pick it on their own.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was started 80 years ago as a result of soldiers and personnel coming back from war. And in that, they were worried about wage inflation. So they said, we can't have any increases in wages competing for talent, but you can create benefits. There'll be operating expenses that you can then expense into your business and it won't be taxable to the individuals. Health insurance was the first one. People were worried about a baby boom. They were worried about all the support that will be needed. And so seven years after that, they started the Hill Burton Act in 1952 where we built hospitals in every community in America. So when everybody started having babies, we would have places for these babies to be seen and everybody would have health insurance. Well, if you create enormous capacity and you give people no sensitivity to price by giving them coverage, you have created a great inflationary monster. And that's what's happened.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it starts with just doing the basics right. It's a lot like trading in the markets. It all starts with a T account. Someone's asset is another person's liability. That's it. And so you have to show people the connections and the line of sight instead of looking at each thing and saying, here, fix this, fix this, fix this. When they start to see how it all fits together, then you've recruited everybody into a mental model about how the world works that we can share. So you don't spend a lot of time looking at little things and dealing with them. They now know the intent of the commander, the march and the mission. And then you start adding on the layers of all the cool things we can do as a result of that.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to paint for them. You have to tell a story about why it matters. So, one of the first things I said at Oscar is we are a pirate ship filled with cannons among Spanish galleons filled with gold. All we have to do is take their business. They don't think we can succeed. We're too small, but we have none of the ballots that they carry around with them about how they run their business. They won't go where we will go. And that's how we win.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Corey, what is an old man in here telling us how to innovate and create new things And I said, but what I want to do is find out where people are and how they think about it so that I can figure out how to bring them to a place because I can't fire everybody. I want to bring them to a place where they can succeed. And so I said, my leadership philosophy is we are here to help ordinary people do extraordinary things. And if we can help them by showing them or asking questions and bringing them along, we can fix things. And that's been part of the story at Oscar.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broken at all. And I know I could walk in here and say, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, and we'll be just fine. And people will look at me and go, who are you? I doubled the average age of the employee population when I walked in the”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aren't what they've sold and made them successful today. So it's about this navigation. And so to do it today when I went to Oscar the first 10 weeks, all I did was do deep dives with everybody in the arts. I met everybody, sat in the room, asked questions, kept a list, set priorities. And over that time, what I thought was low-hanging fruit in the organization were actually watermelons rolling around on the floor. And all we had to do was pick them up and manage them. And Josh Krishna called me and said, I hear you're in meetings asking questions. When are things going to happen? I said, Josh, I have screwed up everything this company has screwed up at least twice myself.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of waiting for all the perfect information to move forward, what you do is you develop a hypothesis, build a process around managing that hypothesis, take in the data as you move along, and then ultimately would be a better thing. And if you look at all the great innovations in our society, those things didn't start as the thing that entrepreneur started with. Apple, those green and orange and yellow boxes you probably don't even remember them. I remember the first PCs.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to get down in the mud and crawl on your belly below the pillbox slot so you don't get shot. And it's just literally the work of doing deep, deep thinking. And in the beginning, I can tell you because I was an MBA out of Cornell and I had all these brilliant ideas that I knew all the answers and didn't need a lot of help. But ultimately over my time, I found in my career that, well, I thought it was right 100% of the time. I'm really only right about 35% of the time. But it's just the issue of making a decision and moving forward. And if you have a good management process around it, it will get better as you go along. It will change because you have to navigate the changes in the business model, the changes in the marketplace. It's a lot like sailing. You don't sail from one point to the next. You actually have to vector because you have the waves and the wind and the sun and the topography and you have to manage that. So that's just like any idea.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Graduate school, and the rest have been phone calls with people who I know who have said, hey, I got an idea or a problem. And if it fit my profile, which is to fix broken things and build new things, not to make the trains run on time, then I said, hey, you know, I can help you. And so all of my jobs after that were people who reached out to me to ask for help.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Platonists are people who think the great idea communicate it and consider their job done. And the Aristotelians actually have to translate it into real work. And I found that being an Aristotelian was far more powerful than being an applatonist. There are a lot of people with great ideas, not too many people can actually make them happen. So that was that chapter. We fixed the business, turned it around ultimately it got sold off. I was sitting at home thinking about what to do next and New York life called me and that was my next chapter going to work in a larger organization to see if I could do what I did with my first turnaround, which was the first company I had. Went to work there. That got sold to Etna. Etna hired me after they started running into trouble to help them fix the company. They were losing a million dollars a day when I showed up in 2022. And we had to fix that. And that took us on a whole journey. And so my career has had one job search, which was my first job search.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first company ran out of money in three years. We're almost out of business. Had to learn that you actually need to implement what you think about, not just think about it. And that's where I developed the concept of Platonist versus Aristotelians.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. It gets a little crowded up here at times at my age now. I've just turned 69. So every once in a while you have to get rid of stuff in order to put new stuff in.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overhead projector, so I had to recalibrate my learning. And then in business, when people hand me spreadsheets, I remember them. And when the cell changes, I view myself as a forensic scientist looking at spreadsheets to see which cells were changed in order to make the numbers work. Yeah, and I can see it. So it actually glows on the page for me when I'm looking at a printed page and there's something misprinted. I can see that word before without reading it.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scary. It makes you lazy. So in high school, when I took my exams, I went to a public high school. All I had to do was remember what was on the blackboard. And I could just repeat it. And I would just write it down. So, when I got to college, I went to the Monteith program, Owain State. That's where I flunked out. It was self study. And that was an absolute disaster for me. There were no blacks, I remember.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was married at the time. My wife and I went and we moved to Ithaca. She worked as a public health nurse in the hills. There's a great book, Rural Poverty in America, is written about that area, and she was their angel in the hills that took care of them when they needed health care coverage. And when I graduated, I was talking to Wall Street about doing investment banking or I was talking to Mike Milken at Drexel about junk bond trading because I was top of my class in finance. And a friend of mine called me, said, you want to start at HMO? And I said, what the hell's an HMO? And he sent me this note, although it was a U.S. healthcare public offering. I looked at it and I went, wow, that looks pretty cool. And we went to Detroit for about a third of the pay I could have got anywhere else and went to work in Detroit to start an HMO.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are the other ones I should never take like organic chemistry. My mother wanted me to be a doctor, and I ultimately realized after working on the streets of Detroit as paramedic that I shouldn't be a doctor, that it wasn't the thing I wanted to do. So I decided to get an accounting degree because that was the quickest way to get a degree so I could become a union steward. Buddy mine was studying for the GMATS. I helped him. I have a photographic memory. He said, you should take the exam. I placed high in the exams and I got all these graduate schools of business to say, hey, why don't you come and talk to us? And so I went around and I went to Cornell and they had these great gorges and water running through these gorges through the campus. It was beautiful. It was in the country. It was very laid back socially, not very laid back. And I said, wow, and you can drink beer and smoke pot now on the gorgeous. This is a cool place. I want to go to school here.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you got better, you got picked. Wow, what a concept, a meritocracy. And so I grew up in that kind of neighborhood. We were loose all the time. We had to make arrangements in the neighborhood to be safe. And we had fights and we had friends. In that process, I learned that there is no good bully. And the only way to beat a bully is to challenge them. And so I was the one who always defended my brothers from bullies. Take that into my career. I was an autoworker in the assembly line of Ford Motor Company when I flunked out of college. I did rear exile differential housing on the Mercury bobcat. Got in a fight with my union steward because I changed my work rules. I moved my stuff around and he didn't like that. He said, that's got to go to the union. I said, how do I get your job? He says, you need a degree, kids. So I looked at my course books. I'd hear other classes I could keep if I actually passed them. Here are the ones I could pass if I actually went to them.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Days when there wasn't any real organized sports for kids, so we were sent out of the house and told to come back when the streetlights came on. And so I always tell people this story of privilege. And I, you know, when we walk down the street, we could pick up 24, 25 kids to go play baseball at the sand lot down the end of the street. And we stood on the third baseline. We picked two captains and they picked the teams. And if you didn't get picked, that meant you weren't good. There were no participation trophies, nobody had to play, and the only way you got to play was by practicing and improving your own game. I had this little cockapoo named Toby who used to shag flyballs for me when I would hit them and try to just learn how to hit better.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up on the east side of Detroit, my dad was an autoworker, he was a pattern maker in the pattern making business, and my mom was a nurse part-time. I'm the oldest of six. There were six of us in seven years, so the youngest seven years younger than I am. So I'm 69 and Philip is 62, but there are six of us in there. We grew up in a thousand square foot house with one bathroom. And I slept in a breezeway. You could see the garage in the back of the house. And so it was one of those rough and tumble sort of you had to compete for households. Yep.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I laid in the water and it took them two hours to get me out of there, but the water was just running across the back of my neck as they extracted me there was a lot of ice and I had my backpack on. They couldn't get it off of me. I had all this ice and snow in there. And it was that ice and that cold water that prevented my spinal cord from rupturing because I have a quadriplegic injury. And in cases like that, there's often this event where the spinal column starts swelling and there is damage created to the spinal cord. And it didn't happen for me. When I woke up five days later, I was getting a sponge bath with a nurse and I said, what are you doing? And he went running from the room and said, oh my God, he's alive. And they didn't expect me to make it. They were very concerned as to whether or not I would make it. And then from there, it was this journey to this day of trying to figure out who I was and how to live with the disabilities I had as a result.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you react to people who frighten you? Because there's this thing called loving kindness meditation where you should find a way to meditate about those that you fear. And he said, well, Mark, in your heart, you need to find compassion for the journey they're on because everyone has their own journey in life. But physically, run. And he laughed.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was skiing one day and had gone into the woods and caught an edge, looking over my shoulder and hit a tree, broke my neck, and slid 60 feet headfirst down into a river in a coma. I broke five of my vertebrae, macerated my brachioplexus, disconnected my nerve root from my left arm from my spinal cord. It took them two hours to extract me from this ravine I was in. And they medevaced me to a hospital, gave me last rites on the way. I was in a coma for five days. And a friend of mine sent me this ring, this memento Mori ring. And he said, remember you will die. And when you look in Renaissance paintings, there's always a skull. That's the concept of momentum mori. Remember, you will die. And he said, so with that in mind, every day when you wear this ring, look at it and ask yourself, am I spending my time with the right people doing?”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source