Debunking Healthcare's Biggest Myths with Zach Weinberg and Derek Thompson
EP 143 of The Logan Bartlett Show: For people building companies - from the people who’ve done it.
Debunking Healthcare’s biggest myths with Zach Weinberg and Derek Thompson ⬇️
Zach Weinberg (Flatiron Health, Curie Bio) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic, known for his widely read pieces on the pandemic, vaccines, and innovation) know this space inside and out. In our latest conversation, they unpack what’s broken in healthcare, and what they’d do to fix it.
Click here to view the episode transcript | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
✉️ Episode Memo
➡️ Why drug prices are a good thing
High drug prices are the easy villain in healthcare, but they actually fuel innovation. Lower prices might sound good now, but they mean fewer new drugs later. It's an uncomfortable tradeoff: are we willing to risk capping medical progress to save money today?
Drugs eventually go generic, so what we pay for now becomes free for future generations. Besides, the vast majority of healthcare spend is the other stuff - doctors, hospitals, and procedures that never go generic.
➡️ The true cost of National Insitute of Health gov budget cuts
The government is cutting the research no one else will do. NIH funds basic biology - the kind of science that can’t be patented but underpins every future drug.
Alzheimer’s is a perfect example: we still don’t fully understand what causes it. If the U.S. government doesn’t fund this research, we are much less likely to see breakthroughs.
Zach and Derek agree that reallocating unnecessary line items would be more useful to science than full on cuts, and Derek adds that the decisions on what to remove are being made hastily.
Plus, government investments are a lot like venture capital, high risk with the potential for outsized returns, so you have to fund many things knowing only a few will succeed.
➡️ Push vs pull funding - why we need both
Pull funding creates a guaranteed market for innovation, helping solve demand uncertainty. Operation Warp Speed is a prime example: instead of giving Moderna money upfront (push funding), the government promised to buy billions in vaccines IF they met targets. That gave every company a reason to stay in the race, even if they weren’t first to market.
Derek hoped this model would be incorporated in the new playbook, but instead, we've reverted to budget cuts and short-term thinking.
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