Healthcare Fixed: No Insurance Needed, Same Doctors, 60% Less - David Goldhill

Charles Schwartz (0:00)

Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where we don't care what you think, only what you can prove.

America pays 40% of the world's health care bill, worth 3% of the population. Today, David Goldhill, founder and CEO of Sesame, joins the show to break down why that happens, why the system is broken, and what he's building to fix it. The show starts now. Hi, everybody, welcome back. I'm excited for this one, David. Thank you for joining us.

David Goldhill (0:26)

Great to be here.

Charles Schwartz (0:27)

So for the four or five people out there who don't know who you are, could you kind of explain who you are, a little bit about your background and then go from there?

David Goldhill (0:34)

Please don't tell me that's 100% of your audience. That's it. I know it isn't, but for the many people who don't know who I am, David Goldhill, I'm the founder and CEO of Sesame, sesamecare.com, which is a marketplace for healthcare services.

There you go.

Charles Schwartz (0:50)

So what have you done before you got to Sesame? So people are like, all right, what are we walking into? What are your claims to fame?

David Goldhill (0:56)

Well, I don't know I have any claims to fame, but I did have a long career as an entertainment executive, mostly in television. I ran television at Universal Studios. I ran the Game Show Network. I built a television network in Russia, which is now a very popular place and made a bunch, distributed a bunch of television shows, also helped run a movie theater chain. So your classic entertainment executive goes to healthcare store.

Charles Schwartz (1:22)

Yeah, I've heard it so many times because our healthcare system works so well right now. It's one of the things that you and I are completely aligned on is that healthcare is just a show. And it's my own show and I should be able to curse, but yeah, it's so, I should. So in this situation, healthcare is ridiculously broken. And I wanted to talk about that because we pay more than anyone else and we subsidize the entire world. You know, I've had this conversation before we started recording. Let's get the audience kind of caught up on that when we talk about that we're subsidizing the rest of the world. Let's walk through that for him.

David Goldhill (1:55)

Well, it's a little complex because it's not what we first see, right? What we first see is people around the world seem to get health care for a lot less money than we do.

And many of those systems, particularly in Western Europe, feel more universal and easier to access than ours.

That's terrible. Underneath it is something much more complicated, which is the United States has the only free enterprise health care system on earth, where we don't control prices and we don't have hospitals and doctors as either employees of the state or owned by the state. And a lot of people think that's bad. But the interesting thing is that's why almost all of the innovation in health care on earth is designed for the American market. Every innovator, no matter where they are, makes the bulk of their money selling to Americans in the American health care system, whether it's new drugs, which gets a lot of attention or new devices or new software. Even new treatment protocols tend to come from people practicing first in America. Why? Because you're free to do so. You have an incentive to do so. Even your local doctor is probably competing against somebody. So she's more likely to buy the latest equipment and get a start to that manufacturer trying to sell something. As a result of this, and again, not easy, not intuitive.

Basically, the quality of health care everywhere else on earth depends on the United States. The example I like to use for my own industry is, you can go to a movie theater in Brussels, and you can see the latest Marvel superhero film in a fantastic screen and a comfortable chair and great concessions and price the same. You can say, if you've been to a crappy movie theater in the United States, the movie industry in Brussels is much better than the movie industry in the United States, and you'd be wrong because all of the capital investment, all of the risk, all of the complexity is American there, and it's even more so in health care.

Charles Schwartz (3:56)

So when we have that, the audience is going to say, because we hear this all the time, and for those of you catching up, I spent eight years in hospice watching people die. So regrettably, I'm very familiar with this world. They're going to say, hey, the same treatment in another country costs fractions of this.