If you want to volunteer in a technical capacity or any other, the doctors are on the move. https://tententen.org/sign-the-pledge/ They need all the help they can get now that they are starting to organize. People said they never would or could never organize, but they are doing it. They have just started their own lobbying organizations and volunteer groups. I am so relieved that the diabetics and the pharmacists are going to receive some backup. Frankly, we need all the help we can get. https://tententen.org/sign-the-pledge/
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Interesting idea @mohe0001 and certainly a project that most of us would like to see happen in our lifetime. This would require a complete overhaul of our medical system from providers to payers to insurers to patients and expectations. The āis there a pill for thatā mentality would need to be addressed somewhere and the for-profit PBMs and all the other middlemen vampires that leach off the medical system. Ten/Ten/Ten is a lofty goal to address not only a medical architecture but also patient behavior.
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With an administration thatās attempting to dismandle affordable healthcare, shut down the department of education, attack colleges and universities, deny science, deny vaccination, end all entitlements, dismantle and destroy social security and medicaid, and remove consumer protections for tax benefits, preexisting conditions, coverage, and medical data collection and dissemination, the chances of the government placing a high focus on healthcare are zippo, nada, zilch, nothing. Doctors pushing high national spending on healthcare are self-serving.
Think about it.
I think we focus on PBM reform over the next couple months. We have convinced a lot of docs to help with that. They just sent some heavy hitters to DC on the 11th. Hereās where you can see a lot of overlap in policy goals between patients and providers. https://free2care.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/report.pdf The Government has picked up a lot of the doctors market fixing concerns, but they wonāt move on that stuff until after our stuff is handled. We got there first. It takes a long time to move this crap thru the meat grinder of government.
We own Trump and Vance on PBM reform. Donāt look to Congress. Look to the regulatory agencies and the Executive branch to make progress on that mess. Iām waiting on this: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-sues-prescription-drug-middlemen-artificially-inflating-insulin-drug-prices Thatās where we see movement. Give it until the end of January. What we see there, is them reaching up above the heads of domestic policy to handle some of the difficulties that cascade down from international markets and the large multinational companies. We have no ability to do that - only the feds can do that. They say that they could never have gotten Eli Lilly and the others to the table without tariffs as leverage. Iām pleased that they got Lilly. That took some time and strategy. They need to hit those GLP-1s because GLP-1s are the new insulin where we see a bunch of price gouging. Trump announces deals with Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk to slash weight loss drug prices, offer some Medicare coverage Progress is being made. Itās tough because they are striking at the drug companies and the PBMs simultaneously. That wasnāt ever really the plan. Everybody thought we would hit PBMs and then hit pharma.
I think they removed around 200 illegal patents from FDA. But there are a lot of those. Teva Removes Over 200 Improper Patent Listings Under Pressure from FTC | Federal Trade Commission They just need to keep plugging away at them. Super time consuming and there are not enough staff.
They are addressing a lot of fraud, but they donāt have the resources to get it all. Thereās too much. DOJ will try, but they almost never succeed in any meaningful way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EtlAsRej80
We really do see a lot of meaningful progress at the level of state governments. That was unexpected to me because the ābetics never had much luck there. Texas is doing a fantastic job. For instance, their AG went after insurers for trying to blackmail patients, providers, and members of the state legislature.
A doc in Texas took a swing at UHG. The retaliation was really bad, but she gained some financial support that might help her survive. Her practice is under water now, but she might eventually be able to make a move. UHG snapped its fingers and kicked her out of network so that her patients couldnāt use insurance at her clinic. That cost her 5 Million overnight. She couldnāt pay her staff. Fundraiser by Elisabeth Potter : Stand with a Surgeon Facing Retaliation UHG really hits the doctors hard if they step out of line. The doctors are a lot more afraid to move than patients are. The insurers have a lot of financial leverage over them and they retaliate. Thatās one reason why doc donāt move. But that is changing. Docs are furious. The doctors finally got AMA to lobby on our side for PBM reform. That was a big deal.
I didnāt understand, until this year, how much retaliation (or the threat of retaliation) was impacting doctors. I just thought they were dumb or nerdy or negligent or too greedy to advocate for themselves or for us. I called them nerds online and told them to grow a pair. I would tease them relentlessly by posting videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBShN8qT4lk But I understand better now how the system works and they have grown a pair, so I promote their efforts wherever I can. Iāve been working on them for a year straight. There has been huge progress. They are in uprising.
The pharmacists are already well organized and we donāt need to worry about them. Pharmacists Really Are Fighting Back - by Kristen Hutchison The pharmacists are a bunch of bad asses. They take care of themselvesā¦and patients, at a legislative level. They are doing great PR. If we can get the doctors up to that level, we are made in the shade. I accidentally provoked a bunch of retaliation against the pharmacists from UHG by trolling UHG online. https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/new-york-times-investigation-reveals-unitedhealth-groups-attempts-escape-scrutiny But the pharmacists were super cool about it. They told me that it wasnāt my fault that UHG was a bunch of jerks. They can hold their own. They are more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLZ5AVHfnCs Because so many of them are still self employed, they have a lot more leverage & autonomy than doctors. They own their own businesses. They are more entrepreneurial. They are tough cats.
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Hereās a great summary of current healthcare investigations from Bricker. I think you will like him. Heās great.
Hereās one of the Doctors going to war. This has the potential for huge personal cost, but sheās moving anyway. Itās brave. Sheās tagging the CEO of Optum. Thatās a scary thing for a doc to do because the insurers can snap their fingers and remove a doctors right to practice.
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Thanks, @mohe0001, I wasnāt aware of any of this, especially retaliations against doctors by insurers or illegal patents!
No problem. It took me months of talking to them every day before they started opening up and I finally understood. It was an important part of forgiveness and us being able to work together because I was secretly really angry with them.
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Iāve not heard of this group. But they say their goal is to spend 10% of GDP on healthcare. That in itself sounds like a lot but then maybe it is less than now, I donāt know!
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The docs donāt have experience with policy. In order for them to successfully advocate for us, I need them to successfully start advocating for themselves. They are not good at that. They are just starting to successfully organize. People said that was impossible. One difficulty is that they come from a wide variety of specialties that each has itās own way of defining the āproblemsā in medicine. They arenāt as cohesive of a community as we are. They arenāt particularly tech savvy. Give them a long leash to play with ideas and policy objectives and form community.
Current estimates of healthcare spend are 20-25% of GDP. 10% is a lofty goal, but itās OK for them to have lofty goals. They are trying, @Trying. 
Thatās a big step forward from a year ago. The more that individual docs step forward and do something brave, the less fear they have as a community and even more people come forward. The ball is rolling.
There are problems that we canāt fix. There are problems, for instance the hospital system, that they need to step forward for. ER docs are particularly pinned down because they can ONLY be employed through a hospital system. They write to me complaining that they canāt even make a single move because they are so pinned down. They have hospital lobbyists crawling all over the internet just looking for people to have fired if they write anything on the internet. https://broadandliberty.com/2025/12/15/jennifer-garzia/
I, personally, like the doctors vs epic because they all hate epic, across every specialty. They all bitch constantly. Its a very unifying issue for them that bleeds into the antitrust concerns of diabetics. the software is controlling their professional autonomy and undermining their professional right to make medical decisions. They take all the blame for that, but the software exerts a lot of control over their ability to practice. Itās build for payors, not for patient care, so it ends up obstructing standards of care. Epic just announced an intention to incorporate CGM data into the medical record. Epic had the ability to do that years ago. The diabetics were making systems interoperable years ago. That can be used to demonstrate how innovation is stunted and standards of care can be harmed by monopolization.
This issue is getting attention this week, and you can see it has attracted the attention of the lawyers and the employee benefits folks. This is a great issue for the doctors to work on, and get their policy land legs. They are working on it. That experience teaches them about how to play in policy effectively.
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Watch them try to talk to one another and figure it out. They jump in to talk to one another about the problems they see. One of them invites the other to speak in a new documentary where he is trying to amplify physician voices/perspective. This is all good. They are soul searching. They are making a movie. We did that. The pharmacists did that. Suck It Up, Buttercup
Check this out. They are all writing to me about this problem.
I talk a lot to the physicians who own there own practices because they have a level of freedom to speak that others donāt. When I speak to doctors, I am very careful to only speak with ones who speak to me first because I donāt want to get them fired.
There are a lot more pharmacists that own their own businesses. Docs have been pushed out of owning their own practices, so there are fewer of them, but the ones that exist are uppity and full of fun and rage. One thing that makes them really angry is that they are often prohibited (by state law) from owning hospitals. When you see them write about āCON Laws,ā that is what they are talking about. CON = Certificate of Need.
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They are on a roll today. 
