Encore! EP385: Morgan Health and the 5 Things Self-insured Employers Should Do Right Now, With Dan Mendelson

A physician practice can only truly transform from a fee-for-service volume machine into something built around health and value once it hits a tipping point: enough of its patients in value-based, risk-based arrangements to make accountability actually feasible. Self-insured employers, who cover roughly 150 million American lives, have an outsized opportunity to help local practices hit that tipping point — but most aren't offering any kind of accountable care arrangement at all. Stacey Richter is re-airing this conversation with Dan Mendelson, CEO of Morgan Health at JPMorgan Chase, as the first of an employer CEO/CFO trilogy on the podcast (Mark Cuban and Andreas Mang follow in the coming weeks), diving into the five concrete things Mendelson says self-insured employers should be doing right now to improve employee health.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why physician practices need a critical mass of patients in value-based, risk-based arrangements before transformation away from fee-for-service becomes financially feasible — and why the whole community benefits once a local practice hits that tipping point

✅ Why self-insured employers, who collectively cover about 150 million American lives, are mostly not offering accountable care arrangements — leaving huge swaths of provider patient panels stuck in the FFS status quo

✅ Dan Mendelson's five things employers should do right now: expand access to accountable care models, invest in the data needed to assess health outcomes, align employee benefits with population health outcomes, prioritize care models that meet employees where they are, and make care navigation central to the benefits experience

✅ What Morgan Health is actually building to help self-insured employers execute on these five things, not just understand them in theory

✅ Why alignment has to include the 150 million Americans getting insurance through their employer, not just providers and payers, for value-based care to actually work at scale

WHY THIS MATTERS

Self-insured employers sit on enormous latent leverage: enough collective patient volume to tip local provider practices into genuine value-based transformation, with benefits that spill over to the entire community once that happens. But per Dan Mendelson, most employers are stuck doing this year what they did last year, which means their communities stay stuck too. Mendelson's five things aren't abstract advice — they're a starting checklist for any self-insured employer ready to use its purchasing power to actually move outcomes, not just costs.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Article: Dan Mendelson's "5 Things CEOs Can Do Today to Improve Employee Health" (Forbes)

Encore! EP206 with Ashok Subramanian: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP358 with Wayne Jenkins, MD: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP308 with Mark Fendrick, MD: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP334 with Sunita Desai, PhD: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

✉️ Enjoy this podcast? Subscribe to the free weekly newsletter

🫙 Support the podcast with a small donation to the Tip Jar

🎤 Listen on Apple Podcasts

🎤 Listen on Spotify

📺 Subscribe to our YouTube channel

=== CONNECT WITH THE RHV TEAM ===

✭ LinkedIn ✭ Threads ✭ Bluesky ✭ X

00:00 Introduction

06:03 What does an accountable care model mean to a self-insured employer?

07:58 "This alignment of value will never work … if the 150 million Americans … getting their health insurance through their employer are not also aligned in the same way."

11:28 "We're offering them a higher level of service."

11:40 "Everything that we do is intended to be scalable and not just for us."

12:09 "We have an obligation to do better for our employees."

14:52 "Employers need to understand, the only way to get outstanding care is locally."

18:18 Why is getting quantitative metric data important?

20:58 "This is a much broader vision of accountable care than … primary care."

22:48 "Until everything is aligned, the employer is just not going to be providing an optimal product."

23:39 "There are substantial issues with … health equity, and employers are paying for the care of 150 million Americans in this country."

25:23 Is digital health access important for creating meaningful relationships between patients and providers?

29:50 What is the myth that employers need to tackle?

30:18 Why is care navigation important for employees?