EP374: How to Grade a Health Plan and a Few Validated Success Stories, With Dave Chase, Cofounder of Health Rosetta

How to Grade a Health Plan, With Validated Employer Success Stories, With Dave Chase. Rosen Hotels Saved $450 Million on Healthcare. Here's the Playbook Behind It. Episode 374.

Stacey Richter talks with Dave Chase, cofounder of Health Rosetta, about validated employer success stories like Rosen Hotels and Pacific Steel—and the Plan Grader tool Health Rosetta built to give employers an objective way to assess whether their health plan is actually working.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ How Rosen Hotels saved over $450 million in healthcare costs while spending 55% less per capita despite a challenging employee health population

✅ Why Pacific Steel's CFO said cutting healthcare spend in half had the same net income impact as growing top-line sales revenue by 25% to 30%

✅ How the Nuka System in Alaska delivers award-winning outcomes for a challenging patient population at lower cost than most Medicaid plans

✅ Why regional change tends to follow a "rule of three": once three employers in a market fix their health benefits, a cascade tends to follow

✅ Why Health Rosetta built a Plan Grader, assessing 40 attributes of a health plan, given the near-total absence of objective health plan quality benchmarks

✅ Why Chase argues that clinicians receive only $0.27 of every $1 spent on healthcare, with the rest going to price gouging, administrative bloat, fraud, and inappropriate treatment

WHY THIS MATTERS

With $1.5 trillion wasted annually in US healthcare—what Chase calls "Healthcare-istan"—and virtually no objective way to grade whether a given health plan is delivering value, employers have had few tools to separate real reform from vendor marketing. Chase's validated case studies and the Plan Grader give employers concrete proof points and a framework for holding their own health plan to the same standard.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

EP312 with Douglas Eby, MD, MPH, CPE: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP365 with Scott Haas: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP367 with Doug Hetherington: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP350 with Katy Talento: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

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00:00 Introduction.

06:57 Why did Dave Chase start Health Rosetta?

07:51 How does Health Rosetta deem which health plans are succeeding?

11:07 What are the most important areas and factors for grading health plans?

11:38 "That $1.5 trillion of waste, how is that possible? Well, it's all codified in the contracts."

12:18 "You can't manage what you can't measure."

16:59 "What could be more disruptive than 30 years of wage gains stolen by the status quo health plans?"

17:39 "This is the last major area to modernize inside of corporate America."

18:15 "This is not small dollars; there's a tremendous opportunity."

19:04 "Go back to PBM. That's the first thing that starts to get at the care delivery side."

21:52 "Can we even call it primary care if you can't get in to that doc for weeks?"

25:03 Where does Health Rosetta get their data to assess health plans?

27:00 Who are these self-insured employers, typically?

29:48 "3.5% [is] where the market flips."

33:13 "We like to fetishize big in this country."