175 - Why Health Insurance Is Becoming Unaffordable for the Middle Class

Vic and Marcus break down the ripple effects of a major winter storm in Nashville before covering a wide range of healthcare and tech developments, including rising ACA premiums as subsidies expire, corporate layoffs and their impact on insurance markets, venture funding for virtual autism therapy, Medicare Advantage rate pressure, insurer earnings declines, strong performance from major health systems, the growth of direct-to-consumer healthcare brands, Amazon and One Medical’s expansion into at-home diagnostics, consolidation in employer-sponsored primary care, the long-term realities of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, new FDA-approved treatments for presbyopia, Tether’s aggressive gold accumulation strategy, rapid advances in AI agents, open-source frontier models, and the economic and societal implications of accelerating artificial intelligence.

Links
00:00 - Intro

4:23 - Health Insurance Is Now More Expensive Than the Mortgage for These Americans WSJ

9:09 - Amazon to Lay Off Around 16,000 Corporate Employees WSJ

10:50 - AnswersNow Raises $40M to Expand Access to Autism Therapy MedCity

16:50 - Trump Administration Proposes Keeping Steady the Rates Medicare Pays Insurers WSJ

18:02 - Investors Assumed Medicare Advantage Was Safe Under the GOP. They Were Wrong. WSJ

22:39 - UnitedHealth revenue climbs in 2025, though profit continues to fall Healthcare Dive

23:33 - Elevance Health sets 'prudent' 2026 guidance as it navigates ongoing cost, utilization pressures Fierce Healthcare

25:06 - HCA Healthcare unveils bullish 2026 guidance despite $600M-$900M ACA exchanges hit Fierce Healthcare

26:16 - Cleveland Clinic CEO: Budget overperformance in 2025 paves way for growth Fierce Healthcare

28:02 - Hims & Hers uses another Super Bowl ad to tackle healthcare affordability Fierce Healthcare

33:13 -At-home testing company Reperio teams up with Amazon One Medical on preventive care Fierce Healthcare

34:34 - Employer-focused primary care companies Premise Health, Crossover Health announce merger plans Fierce Healthcare

37:10 - Here’s What Happens when you stop taking Ozempic and Wegovy (Wall Street)

39:28 - Presbyopia Eye Drop From Startup Tenpoint Gets FDA Approval (Medcity News)

41:29 - Tether is buying up to $1 billion of gold per month and storing it in a 'James Bond' bunker CoinDesk

45:26 - The Adolescence of Technology Dario Amodei 

51:51 - Clawdbot sheds skin to become Moltbot, can't slough off security issues Register

56:00 - Moonshot AI releases open-source Kimi K2.5 model with 1T parameters Silicon Angle