Chris Bevolo, Chief Brand Officer at Revive
How can health care consumerism transform the patient experience? Chris Bevolo, Chief Brand Officer at Revive, reflects on his recent book, “Joe Public 2030: Five Potent Predictions, Reshaping How Consumers Engage Healthcare," and how his research continues to uncover new directions and ways to learn from the past and present. He draws on his experience in healthcare marketing to share possible future scenarios, who’s driving the change, and opportunities we have to create a healthy future.
Chris Bevolo is the Chief Brand Officer at Revive, a national integrated marketing agency that helps brands lead the way in health. He has provided leadership and guidance in the areas of strategy, brand, marketing, digital, and change management to hospitals and health systems across the country for more than 20 years. Chris is an award-winning author of six books, including “Joe Public Doesn’t Care About Your Hospital,” which became a field guide for driving transformation in hospital marketing departments across the country.
He is a frequent keynote speaker and featured presenter on healthcare marketing and branding topics. Before joining Revive, Chris was the owner and lead strategist of Interval, a Minneapolis-based healthcare marketing firm he founded in 1995.
Show Notes
Chris Bevolo shares his background in healthcare marketing. [03:52]
The intersection of health care and consumers. [05:21]
How will health care consumerism evolve? [07:15]
Predictions in "Joe Public 2030: Five Potent Predictions, Reshaping How Consumers Engage Healthcare." [09:01]
How do we close the health care equity gap? [11:45]
How do we shift challenging health care predictions now? [14:03]
How do we make health care technology accessible? [16:11]
Can the US sustain the current healthcare model? [18:39]
Who’s driving the change in the healthcare system? [20:42]
What recent US tax law change will affect employer-based health insurance? [22:43]
What is the health care funnel war? [25:14]
What is the politicalization of healthcare? [29:34]
Who are the mainstreamers in healthcare? [32:07]
Who are the progressives? [33:18]
Who are the contrarians? [34:02]
What’s the advice for students entering medical school today? [37:34]
Transcript
Bisi Williams 0:00
Hi. I'm Bisi Williams, you're listening to Health2049.
Chris Bevolo 0:08
Where we see this going is to the point where you may see politically-oriented clinics or hospitals start to crop up. It's kind of surprising to me that we haven't seen it already. If somebody today in Dallas said, I'm starting a whatever clinic, and we have a different approach to vaccines, all vaccines, not just COVID, we have a different philosophy about your care, people would line up around the block for that. And so it just poses all kinds of issues, clearly, if we got there. Even if we don't go all that far, it still poses challenges for those delivering care, because you have a segment of the population that is increasingly not agreeing with what you say, which is medical science, and not agreeing with it. They have a lot of people to support their point of view. At a minimum, they may not follow your treatments, or they may just decide not to see you at all.
Bisi Williams 2:13
Have you ever considered the idea of a health sect, a religious sect or a social sect? Or in the case of our discussion today, medical tribalism. My guest today Chris Bevolo has just published a new book, "Joe Public 2030: Five Potent Predictions, Reshaping How Consumers Engage Healthcare." The book extrapolates on our changing social landscape and how in the decades to come that may affect our interaction with the health system and the nature of the system itself, from A.I. to personal monitoring to consumerism to the politicization of health care. Chris Bevolo is a writer, healthcare industry futurist and strategist with over 20 years of experience in the field of health care. He is the Chief Brand Officer at Revive, a national integrated marketing agency that helps brands lead the way in health. He is an award-winning author of six books, including "Joe Public Doesn't Care About Your Hospital," which became a field guide for driving transformation in hospital marketing departments across the country. Before joining Revive, Chris was the owner of Interval, a Minneapolis-based healthcare marketing firm he founded in 1995. I'm excited to have a futurist talking about the future of health and wellness in the year 2049. Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Bevolo 3:38
Hey, thank you so much. So glad to be here.
Bisi Williams 3:40
Well, I'm excited to have a futurist on the show talking about the future of health and wellness, welcome. So Chris, tell us a bit about your background and how you've come to be the Chief Brand Officer of Revive.
Chris Bevolo 3:52
Yeah, it's a little scary when you read my bio, it goes back to 1995. It's a little frightening to hear back to yourself. I started in marketing and worked all over different industries, so I really didn't focus on health care until about 2000. But once you land in one industry, you really get a chance to understand it deeply. And even though my focus has been marketing and branding, and communications, once I joined Revive, which happened in 2014, I really came into an environment where folks have dug deep into the business of healthcare.
And so for the last eight years, I've had that as well, in my background, and so all of that kind of culminates in the book we're going to talk about. Also in the role I play now, which is Chief Brand Officer, we've expanded at our agency. We used to work primarily with providers, which we still do today, but we're out there looking to help any brand that's trying to lead the way in health. And to do that you really have to understand the industry, you have to understand consumers, and you have to understand what's coming down the pike in this world. And there's so much we could talk about. So we'll see how we do to try to cover as much ground as we can.
Bisi Williams 5:12
I'm excited, so tell me, why did you decide to write Joe Public 2030?
Chris Bevolo 5:21
Yeah, as you mentioned, we wrote the first book in this series, "Joe Public Doesn't Care About Your Hospital" in 2011. As we approached last year, it was the end of 2020, our CEO said, we should do a final book. So there's been three in the series and I thought, oh, gosh, another book, I told everybody, there won't be any more books. Okay, so what are we gonna write about? And we thought, well, it's been 10 years, let's just pivot, do a 180 and look 10 years out in the future. And so we set out to do that. We had a long process.
I can give some details about that, if we need to. We looked at all kinds of research, all kinds of data, we talked to a bunch of really smart people in the industry. And we set out to really look at what 2030 will look like in terms of health care, marketing, and branding. But we got about a third of the way through it and really realized what we were talking about was at a much higher level than just marketing and branding. It was really about the intersection of health care with consumers. And so that's where we ended up really pointing these predictions. They have huge implications, if you're in marketing or branding communications, like our agency is and our clients that we work with, but the work in what we're talking about is really at a higher level.
Bisi Williams 6:36
I agree and that's what fascinated me about your book and having you on our show, because your book goes beyond marketing and communications. It's really looking at the structure of care and infrastructure in the United States. But the fresh take that you have by putting a consumer face on it, which I guess is a natural extension of "Joe Public Doesn't Care About Your Hospital," but what is it like for the individual to actually navigate through this landscape of this evolving health care, and health and wellness situation that we're facing?
Chris Bevolo 7:15
Yeah, the story I always tell about this and it's related to one of the predictions in the book about consumerism, which maybe isn't as positive as people might expect. We've been talking about consumerism for so long. When I first started doing presentations on it, I used to show a picture of my daughter, and it was one of those classic pictures. She's a toddler, she's in a highchair, she has spaghetti all over her face, she doesn't look very happy. And I would say this is what your consumer feels like when they have to wait in the waiting room when they can't schedule an appointment online, when they can't get in to see a doctor, all the nonsense that we would put people through. The joke about that is that daughter Callie, just graduated from high school. That's how long we've been talking about consumerism.
One of the predictions talks about, we really haven't come close to what the promise of consumerism was supposed to be. And unfortunately, it's not going to get better, it's probably going to get worse in a lot of ways. And so the way it looks, I think for those consumers today there's a lot of new things that are great. But still, if you've gone through or if you know anybody has gone through like a hospitalization, you're still dealing with a lot of the things that we've been talking about forever, still confusing, still scary, still slow. And there's a lot of ways we can come at that. But unfortunately, things aren't as great, I think for the health care consumer as we'd hoped.
Bisi Williams 8:44
On that note, I want to talk about those issues, because we're talking about fact-based optimism. And so what I'd love for you to share with our listeners is your vision for the future of health and wellness in 2049.
Chris Bevolo 9:01
Yeah, I think it's really hard to pick a vision, a singular vision, this is just my point of view. Because it really depends on who you are. In the book, the first prediction paints a really positive future. We call it the Copernican consumer where everything revolves around the consumer. It's brought to you, the services that you need are wherever you want them in your home primarily. There's a lot that can be done virtually, you're going to be able to manage your health in a far better way, precision medicine, monitoring, all of these things are going to be fantastic, and also improvements in clinical care. The treatments of things like cancer, or heart failure, and all of that just continues to advance. So that vision is very, very positive.
The problem is we get to the last prediction in the book, which we call disparity dystopia. You're only going to benefit from what I just described if you're what we call a ‘have.’ If you're somebody who's very wealthy, if you're somebody who has access to commercial employer-sponsored health insurance. A lot of what we talk about is expensive. You have to be smart enough to know how to use it, you have to have access to it all. The ‘have nots,’ the folks that don't have the access either physically to the care they need, virtually because of the technology gap or otherwise. we're talking about folks that have historically faced disparities and inequities, which could be communities of color, that could be the elderly, that could be the poor. Unfortunately, their vision of the future doesn't look nearly as good.
For one, they're not gonna be able to access that beautiful scene I just painted a second ago, the Copernican consumer. Second of all, the things they face today that forced them to deal with disparities, inequities are really going to get worse. We talk about climate change. Climate change has an outsized impact on those people who already face health disparities and inequities. And climate change, if you talk to most people, we would agree is not going to get better, it's going to get worse unless we do something dramatic. So this gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is going to widen. And so that vision of 2049 may depend on which side of that gap you're on, unfortunately.
Bisi Williams 11:24
So I'm going to push back a little bit here. And I'm going to just say that you're right, those are facts. from a design perspective, what can we do today, to close the chasm between the haves and the have nots in your vision for the Copernican consumer, for example?
Chris Bevolo 11:45
I think there are some obvious solutions that are out there. They're just difficult for us to figure out how to bring to fruition. How do we provide more affordable health coverage to everybody? We've made some strides that way, we've added millions of people under insurance over the past 10 years, or eight years since the ACA was enacted. But there's plenty more to go. And also, those people with insurance are spending more and more out of pocket. And you look at things like medical bankruptcy, which is the number one reason for bankruptcy in this country. It's not just the people without health insurance, it's those that have lower levels of insurance, or they have a lifetime cap of a million dollars, which sounds like a lot, unless you get in a really traumatic accident, or you have a really deadly disease, a chronic disease.
We could solve a lot of the issues design wise, if we could design a system that included everybody. Bisi, we got to know each other from a long lost cousin of mine, Marco Bevolo and I had the thrill of interviewing him for this book. And one of the quotes that we use in the book is from Marco who's from Europe. He's got an incredible background as a futurist himself. He studied national health systems, something he said that resonated with me and is one of the quotes that people cite when they've read the book is, he said, a health care system generally reflects the culture. And what I take from that is, our culture in the United States right now doesn't allow for that kind of solution. I just mentioned, we're not there. And so that's the solution just sitting right there. Medicare for all would be one example of that. It's not the only one. But boy, are we a long way from something like that. And a large part, that's because our culture has other values that predominate over something like that.
Bisi Williams 13:44
I think that's fascinating. And I'm going to touch on that a bit more. So tell me, the vision that you impart in the book, and the folks that you've interviewed, how does that and some of those visions, which we'll get into a little bit later, how does it make the world a better place from your perspective?
Chris Bevolo 14:03
Well, it's really interesting, when I finished writing the book, it was the first time I looked back at the predictions and when you go through them, they kind of start with the Copernican consumer, which is very, very positive, and they kind of go downhill from there. And what I mean by that is, they're not the most positive outcomes that we want. The last one is disparity dystopia. And I realized, oh my gosh, okay, this really takes a turn. And that was not intentional. But I remembered why we did this in the first place, which was, let's try to understand what's coming in the future.
The truth is, you got to put this stuff on the table. If these issues, if we have captured them correctly and if they don't predict the best future, then A, we've got to acknowledge that because there's no way to address it if we don't acknowledge it. Then B, as we say, around the agency related to this, the future is what you make it. So if some of the visions that are in the book aren't as positive as we want, and certainly some are not, then let's do something about that. Let's look at what's in there and say, Boy, this is accurate, if we don't do anything, this is where we're going to head, so let's do something about it.
We got to have the conversation and this book really doesn't hold back in what conversations we need to have. And that, to me is, I'm optimistic about our ability and of course, we're not saying things that other people aren't saying, too, but I'm optimistic that with that on the table, we can make the changes we think we may need to make, to make it a better future.
Bisi Williams 15:39
I couldn't agree with you more. And I really want to talk about this, because you're really our first guest who sort of looked at both sides of the divide. And I think that's really interesting. When you talk about, you can't just discuss all of these amazing advancements without recognizing that millions of people in the United States, and billions of folks globally don't have access to the advancements that we're talking about. So can you tell us a bit more about your thought process on that?
Chris Bevolo 16:11
I want to be clear, too, when we sat down to write this book, we had no preconceived notions. We didn't have any agenda, we didn't say, boy, we really want to talk about this and let's figure out how we're going to come at it. We just put it all on the table, and used the process that allowed all of this to come forward.
But when you think about, let's just take one example, the promise of genomics and the promise of precision medicine to develop treatments that are custom-designed to your genetic makeup, and we're already seeing some of that come to market. We're seeing solutions that can help people who are blind, for example, based on their genetic makeup, and it's incredible what these treatments can do. It is the future of medical science. And there's going to be more and more of that coming.
At the same time, as we note in the book, and I can't even remember my own book, I'm going to quote the price wrong, but it doesn't matter, you get the point. That treatment, I'm talking about, costs like $800,000 per eye. So now again, I didn't have time to look it up real quick, but maybe it's $400,000. It's a lot of money. It's six figures. And so that's where you go, Hey, that's a great solution that is now accessible to who? Who's going to pay for that? Is the insurance company going to pay for that?
You've seen a lot in the news recently, I think it's for an Alzheimer's drug that once it's approved by the FDA, Medicare has to cover it. And the cost of this new Alzheimer's drug is through the roof. So the question is, okay, yes, FDA approved. This is a valid solution and treatment for Alzheimer's. But it costs, I don't know what it costs, a million dollars? And now Medicare's got to cover it, what's that going to do financially to the country? So if the country can't pay for it, private payers can't pay for it. You're down to the individual and how many people can pay $400,000, $500,000, $800,000 per eye for whatever their situation is, so that's the dilemma that as science advances. A lot of times. it’s the costs associated with it.
Bisi Williams 18:19
100% I mean, we're all for research and development, and we're all for cure. And then there's this big price tag in the middle. But I want to ask you this question, which is, do you believe that the US can sustain its current healthcare system model?
Chris Bevolo 18:39
No. I say no, primarily because I heard Uwe Reinhardt speak and for people that don't know him, they should look him up. He was a health economist, brilliant dude. And also really could bring forward a story in a compelling way. And I was at a conference, this must have been 10 years ago, 15 years ago, he's passed now, but in the conference, he said, here's the trajectory of income rising in the United States over the next 50 years or 80 years, I don't remember and here's the trajectory of health care costs. At some point, we're going to get to the place, which we've already passed for most families, where your health care costs are more than your mortgage. Eventually, we're gonna get to a place where every disposable dollar you have will have to go to health care if we don't stem the growing costs.
We have not stemmed that. There have been some steps back, but overall, we continue to see an increase in the cost of health care. And so something's got to change. We can't sustain this. Long term it will bankrupt Medicare. At a minimum, people are already going bankrupt as individuals. It's becoming harder and harder to afford insurance. You've got changes in the economy where so many workers that were covered by employer-sponsored care are now gig workers, and they have no health insurance, or it's very bad health insurance that they can get on the market cheaply. And so we just can't keep going this way, something's got to give, hopefully, we can figure that out before it does give.
Bisi Williams 20:19
I agree with you. And when you look at this picture that you've painted about rising costs, and then the consumer dollars, unable to meet those needs, or reach, except for a very few are constructed consumer, tell us a little bit about that person, and what the life that they would lead would look like, in the future.
Chris Bevolo 20:42
Yeah, this was the one where I feel proves my point that we did not set out to have an agenda. Because if I had said, I want to make this a prediction, it would have been the increasing power of the trend of consumerism. Instead, what we learned is actually no, folks are going to become more and more constricted in their choice.
Now, when you think about that, compared to the Copernican consumer, as well as another prediction we'll get to, there's going to be a lot of choices in some ways. I can go to 100 places right now to get my COVID test, literally 100. I can go to the grocery store, I can go to the post office, wherever it is. But if I want surgery, that's where the constriction is going to come, where the real expensive care is, we're just going to continue to see more constricted options. There's two things that I learned in writing this book that were fascinating to me.
One was, the number of experts we talked to had said, the problem with the promise of consumerism is we're focused on the wrong consumer. We're focused on the individual as if we as the patient, we as the consumer, are going to be the ones driving change. But the truth is, we're not the ultimate customer of health care if you measure it in terms of money. The ultimate customer, the one who spends the most money, are employers, insurance companies, or payers. And that's both public and private. The entity that spends the most money on health care in this country is Medicare. And so they're the ones with a financial incentive. They're the ones driving change, which is why you see things like a PBM model emerge, which is the most convoluted thing you can imagine, that benefits providers, that benefits payers, and has some degree of benefits for consumers, but it's not in place for consumers at all. So that was one thing that was fascinating, the degree to which we heard from experts.
The other was something that I was unaware of, that a change in tax law, or, basically, an interpretation of the tax law came about in 2020. Most companies provide health benefits because it's a great way to recruit, but also because it's tax deductible. Well, the ruling was, you don't just have to provide health benefits to get a tax deduction, you could give all of your employees an equivalent amount of money or some money and say, here's $5,000, go out in the market and get your own insurance. And that would still count as tax deductible for the employer. So we could see a lot of employers getting out of the health insurance providing business. And it's very similar to what happened with retirement, where there was a loophole found in the 401k laws that said, oh, look, let's get away from pensions. and let's put the burden on the individual. Let's get out of the business of retirement. It's too costly. There's too much risk, same kind of thinking with health care. So a number of them said, we're going to see more and more companies doing this, which again, really you lost as a consumer, one of your greatest advocates, if that happens, which is your employer.
Bisi Williams 23:57
That is a terrible piece of policy.
Chris Bevolo 24:00
It's fascinating to hear this. I didn't know about it. I had not read about it. So these are health care experts that are like, oh, yeah, it's just an interpretation of the tax law, basically. And so it's not something that we're hearing a lot about in the news. Some companies have moved to it, but very few. And again, we have to remember not providing health benefits would be seen right now in a talent war as well, I'm not going to go to a place that doesn't give me health benefits.
But one of the experts we talked to said, it's going to be spun and sold as freedom. You have freedom to do whatever you want. We're not going to tell you that you only get two plans. Here's your money, go out and get whatever you want. You have the freedom of choice, theoretically. But I helped my dad shop for a Medicare plan on the exchange and of the 20 something that he had access to in Minnesota, only two of them included his primary care physician So there's your choice. Oh, there's 25 plans. Not if I want to keep my doctors, there are two. So that's just one example of how things are going to become constricted.
Bisi Williams 25:08
Okay, that's fascinating. Chris, let's talk about the funnel wars.
Chris Bevolo 25:14
Yeah, this is our maybe exaggerated metaphor of calling it a war. But if you're a legacy hospital and health system, you ought to have a hunker down, we better get ready for a battle attitude about who is coming into the health care space. So right now if you go look at the Fortune 500, the top five companies, two of them are CVS and United Healthcare, so 100% in on health care. The other three are Apple, Amazon, and Walmart. All three of them have staked huge claims to be going into health care.
Tim Cook said in an interview, that when all is said and done Apple's legacy will be known most for its impact on health, which is astounding when you think about where Apple is today. Amazon just announced this week that they're opening 20 Amazon health stores around the country. The book actually jokes about predicting that and then now here it is. A lot of people saw that coming, so there's nothing surprising there.
It just shows you, if you're a health system, and you're up against Amazon, and you're up against Apple, forget about one medical and all the other startups and all the venture capital that are out there that are also coming into your markets, and the battle is for the patient relationship. These new entities aren't going to do heart surgery, they never will, they don't want to. They want to provide what we call top of the funnel, so where people enter health care, that's virtual care, urgent care, sometimes emerging care, but primary care is a big part of it. They want to play there, because that's where they can maintain a relationship that helps the rest of their business.
What that means is if you're hospital health system, you lose, it's a funnel, people start at the top and they flow down, you've just lost access to people at the top of the funnel, you are now beholden to somebody else to send you patients and potentially become what one person we interviewed said, would be a downstream vendor of care, which sounds pretty awful if you're a health system.
Bisi Williams 27:26
Tell me a bit more because if you think about the future, we always think that we're getting to a relationship model and less transactional. But what I'm hearing, keep me honest, Chris, is that what's really going to be left for the monument on the hill.
Chris Bevolo 27:46
Right, in fact, one of the CEOs of an AMC said in a meeting that we were in once, we don't want to become a giant ICU on the hill. Now, there's going to be a need for that, there will always be a need for that. And in fact, the most lucrative part of a health system is the inpatient surgical type of care. So you can still thrive there, but you're going to be far smaller, as a health system, and you're going to be beholden to others for your business. It's almost going to become like a B2B, when a couple of experts we talked to said they're going to cease being consumer-oriented brands, like most health systems are now and they're going to be like B2B brands. So you can still succeed that way.
The other thing to say is, a lot of the experts we talked to said, this isn't just going to happen wholesale across the industry, it is going to happen almost market to market. So the battles are going to be geographically-focused. You might see a Geisinger in Pennsylvania thrive, because they're already integrated. They're already doing really well at the top of the funnel, and they're offering all the things you might need. Whereas in other markets, some of the systems are going to lose out to a CVS or an Amazon, or Walmart. And the last thing I'll say is, when we proposed this after we learned enough about it from experts, it was astounding to me that the feedback we heard from a handful of them wasn't if this will happen, the question is really when and where.
Bisi Williams 29:15
Yeah, that's amazing. I thought this was just very clever and my hat's off to you and your team. I'd love you to just dive into the rise of health sects.
Chris Bevolo 29:34
I think you said this at the beginning, this is a truth-based future. All of these predictions are grounded in things happening today. None of these are like, well, someday this will start to happen. They're all starting to happen today. This one included, but where we take this one I think is a little different.
So what we're talking about is the politicalization of healthcare, which is not new. If you go back and you look at newspaper clippings of 1918, you'll see stories about the Anti-mask League of San Francisco during the Spanish flu. Of course, politics shapes things like women's health care services at Catholic Healthcare Systems and so it's been with us, but it's always been behind the scenes. Hospitals and health systems have always been able to kind of stay above the fray.
But the social justice movement that started in 2020 with the George Floyd murder, which happened in my market, combined with COVID and in the politicalization of everything from is COVID real, to wearing a mask, to the vaccine, and all the other things have really placed health care in a position that they can't ignore this. But also, whatever you say is going to tweak somebody. And if you don't say something that's going to tweak somebody. So where we see this going is to the point where you may see politically-oriented clinics, or hospitals start to crop up. It's kind of surprising to me that we haven't seen it already.
If somebody today in Dallas said, I'm starting a whatever clinic, and we have a different approach to vaccines, all vaccines, not just COVID, we have a different philosophy about your care, people would line up around the block for that right now. And so it just poses all kinds of issues. Clearly, if we got there, even if we don't go all that far, it still poses challenges for those delivering care, because you have a segment of the population that is increasingly not agreeing with what you say, which is medical science, not agreeing with it and a lot of people to support their point of view. And at a minimum, they may not follow your treatments, or they may just decide not to see you at all.
Bisi Williams 32:04
So take us through the mainstreamers.
Chris Bevolo 32:07
Yeah, that's just where we were, that nearly all, probably all health systems or hospitals follow mainstream medical advice. Get your kids vaccinated, just as one example. I don't mean to get political right off the bat. But hey, here we are. Get your measles vaccination. Get your polio vaccination. We have done this forever and yes, there's always been a small, small segment that hasn't believed it, but it's been teeny tiny growing but still teeny tiny. Well, that's exploded and so the mainstreamers are those following medical science, the ones that are saying stay six feet apart, the ones that are saying getting the vaccine is smart, the ones that are saying wearing a mask helps. And we're just talking about COVID right now, of course. But that's the vast majority of providers, and the vast majority of people, the vast is a word that you might have to take out of that. It's just the majority of people now, because there's a growing minority, that fights are everything I just said.
Bisi Williams 32:13
And you call them in your book, the progressives. Describe the progressives.
Chris Bevolo 33:18
Well, the progressives is a different group, the progressives are those who kind of eskew medical science, let's say the medical establishment, for reasons like the Christian Science folks who don't believe in any kind of intervention medically, or those who believe in kind of Eastern medicine or holistic medicine, and wouldn't take drugs or wouldn't have surgery. We've seen this crop up in the news here and there where a kid needs some kind of life saving surgery, but the parents won't allow it because it's against their religion. And so that's a small group and it's meant to just draw contrast to the other group that I'm sure you're going to ask about.
Bisi Williams 34:00
Exactly the contrarians.
Chris Bevolo 34:02
Right. And that's the growing political, it is right wing primarily, so we just say it, group of people that are fighting the medical establishment. There's a loss of trust in experts. There's social media fueling this and stealing misinformation. There's a rise in influencers. There's all kinds of trends, sub trends coming together to really empower this group to grow. When you take it all the way to the extreme, well, this couldn't really happen, you couldn't have a clinic of doctors who say don't take the vaccine. But then when you learn about how this is regulated, we had a doctor in Minnesota whose license was being reviewed because he was doing just that. He was telling parents not to give your kids any vaccines, because they're bad for you. And so the state board was reviewing his license right now and you think, oh, that'll take care of all this stuff.
Well, if you dig into how health boards are created, state level, county level, whatever, they're all political appointments. And so if in Idaho in the county, where Boise sits the capitol, a politically-oriented group who is responsible for nominating and signing people to the health board of that county, put somebody on the health board, who does not believe that COVID is real. Yes, really, that's in the news. It's in the book. It's all cited. You have Florida, who's trying to pass a law that would require hospitals to give people treatments no matter whether they're medically approved or not, if they want them, which is a backlash against hospitals saying no, ivermectin, which is not a proven treatment for COVID. Hospital was saying no, this group is so upset that there are legislators in Florida that want to pass a law to say a hospital couldn't do that. They'd have to give you ivemectin whether or not it's clinically proven, which sounds crazy.
But this is all in the news, I'm not making it up. In the book, a former representative from Minnesota, my home state Michele Bachmann, very right wing person, said in an interview in December that we need an alternative health system in the United States, completely distinct, she said, so that we're not beholden to the monsters in DC. That was her quote, and that was in response to the Biden administration, putting vaccine mandates down for the healthcare system, for employers over 100 people, all of that. And so her solution was that we needed a separate system, which is exactly what this prediction is talking about. Now, it seems far-fetched, and maybe won't go that far, probably won't. But would we see a Trump-branded clinic? Would we see a Matt Gates? I'm picking politicians that if they heard this might go, that's a great idea. Because they would have people lined up around the block, I really believe that.
Bisi Williams 36:58
So, this is an interesting test that you've done here, if you really push and push and push the extremes of the behavior that we're seeing around citizens' reactions to public policy, but also just consumers looking for choice and a way of trying to understand and manage their care. Just take me through, as you imagine, say, I'm a young student going to medical school today. And you're looking at these trends, and I really want to be in the business of helping people. What would your advice be?
Chris Bevolo 37:34
Just be ready, we hear from doctors, and we work with hospitals and health systems all the time. So we hear this firsthand, doctors just beside themselves because somebody will come in and they give them the advice they're supposed to give them, they give the treatment protocol, and they refuse to do it. And we hear about all this in the news related to COVID. But it's beyond that.
And so, if you're a doctor, and doctors have political views, there's a great podcast I listened to that talked about how research shows, however, that those political views typically do not influence their medical advice. So they're doing a great job as a profession, for the most part, of keeping that back behind what is the right thing to do, not always, because we've got doctors all over the place that have gone the other way, but the vast majority do that. So it's got to be very frustrating if you are here for the benefit of the patient. And that patient is going to ignore you because of a political point of view or a world point of view, if you want to put it that way. And so you really have to figure out some mechanisms and some strategies for how you're going to help people get around that because it's going to hurt them. And we've seen that time and time again, with the unvaccinated being 40 to 80 times more likely to die of COVID if you're unvaccinated than if you're boosted. I mean that's just unassailable, crazy, and really sad. And so be ready for that if you're a doctor, of really helping empathize with people, trying not to be judgmental, and really help them to get through to a place where they can do the right thing for themselves.
Bisi Williams 39:20
I love that, help them do the right things for themselves. Chris, thank you for a fascinating and just mind expanding conversation about the future of health and wellness.
Chris Bevolo 39:31
Yeah, it's been a pleasure. So great to have this conversation that's the whole point of the book is just to drive more and more debates and with the first line of the book says you will not agree with all the content in this book. So that's the whole point. So really glad to be here with you.
Bisi Williams 39:47
That was Chris Bevolo sharing his vision for health and wellness in the year 2049. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, rate review and tell one friend about us. Thanks for listening. I'm your host Bisi Williams, take care and be well.
