Thoughts from the Road

Disclaimer: This is not a political blog or platform for political conversation. However, it’s hard to ignore the mess that the Iowa caucus has become. So, bringing it back to what we care about for these thoughts, I see a useful, albeit somewhat obvious to the experienced, cautionary tale of the dangers involved when launching

Mid-sized, regional health plans are stuck in the middle. Every health plan faces the same issues: consolidating providers and medical trends that premiums can’t cover. But mid-sized payers have a specific challenge of being neither fish nor fowl. On one hand, national plans and dominant local plans have scale and contracting advantages that are difficult to match. On the other hand, there is an increasing number of “piranha” plans that bite off small, niche chunks of sub-sub segments. So, what is a mid-sized plan to do? How can they create market distinction?

The iPhone is an engineering marvel. Really, it is orders of magnitude more powerful and complex than the Apollo Guidance Computer. And yet it’s simple enough for even a toddler to use intuitively. The magic is in its simplicity.