🚨 The Truth About Value-Based Care: A System Designed for Profits, Not Patients 🚨
Alex Azar’s relentless push for Value-Based Care (VBC) is not only misguided—it’s outright dangerous. His speech at the 2024 Fierce Health Payer Summit was filled with buzzwords like "aligning incentives" and "data sharing," but not once did he mention how VBC actually benefits patients. Why? Because it doesn’t.
Interwell Health, one of the biggest care coordination companies, is aggressively lobbying for VBC because it profits from controlling access to care—not from improving patient outcomes. Their real goal is aligning nephrologists and insurers to ration treatments, delay transplants, and maximize cost savings—all while pretending this is about “value.”
💰 The Real Purpose of VBC: Limiting Patient Access
VBC was supposed to revolutionize kidney care. Instead, it has:
Increased administrative burdens on nephrologists, forcing them to justify every decision to middlemen who have never treated a single dialysis patient.
Created more barriers to transplant referrals, because transplants cost insurers more in the short term—even though they save money and lives in the long run.
Pushed home dialysis as a cost-saving measure, not because it’s always best for the patient, but because it’s cheaper for the system.
Allowed private equity-backed coordination companies like Interwell Health to act as gatekeepers, deciding which treatments are “worth” the expense.
🚨 The Criminal Negligence of Alex Azar
Alex Azar’s speech reads like a sales pitch for insurers and corporate medicine, not an actual plan to improve care. He claims VBC is ready for full-scale adoption despite its failures in kidney care. But here’s what Azar conveniently ignores:
Where is the actual patient outcome data? "Increases in home dialysis, depression screening, and waitlisting" mean nothing if patients are still struggling to get transplants and still dying at alarmingly high rates.
Why does he downplay the rationing of care? VBC has created an incentive to deny life-saving treatments, yet Azar frames it as “cost savings.”
Why are insurers and corporate middlemen in charge of patient care? Interwell Health’s entire business model is to profit off denying or delaying access to care—not to improve patient health.
Azar’s push to force VBC into every corner of healthcare is a calculated move to enrich insurers, not protect patients. The fact that he cites kidney care as the model for VBC is terrifying—because kidney patients remain among the most vulnerable, underserved, and exploited populations in U.S. healthcare.
🛑 Patients Are Not Cost Centers. We Are Human Beings.
Value-Based Care is not about value—it’s about maximizing corporate profits by rationing care. If VBC truly worked, we would see better transplant rates, lower mortality, and fewer bureaucratic hurdles—not more corporate interference in patient decisions.
🔴 We need patient-first reform, not more cost-cutting schemes disguised as "value."
🔴 We need transparency in how these programs work—not another black box controlled by insurers and for-profit middlemen.
🔴 We need to dismantle the role of private equity in kidney care—before even more patients die waiting for care they should have received sooner.
Alex Azar, Interwell Health, and every other corporate lobbyist pushing this predatory model of care should be held accountable. The true cost of their greed isn’t just dollars—it’s the lives of kidney patients sacrificed for their bottom line.
![Signals From [Space]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_36,h_36,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F55686857-6b99-45a6-ac0f-09c9f023f2a0_500x500.png)
![Signals From [Space]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/e_trim:10:white/e_trim:10:transparent/h_72,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d588ac1-7fac-4bd4-829d-fc7b4e8f1326_1512x288.png)
🚨 The Truth About Value-Based Care: A System Designed for Profits, Not Patients 🚨
Alex Azar’s relentless push for Value-Based Care (VBC) is not only misguided—it’s outright dangerous. His speech at the 2024 Fierce Health Payer Summit was filled with buzzwords like "aligning incentives" and "data sharing," but not once did he mention how VBC actually benefits patients. Why? Because it doesn’t.
Interwell Health, one of the biggest care coordination companies, is aggressively lobbying for VBC because it profits from controlling access to care—not from improving patient outcomes. Their real goal is aligning nephrologists and insurers to ration treatments, delay transplants, and maximize cost savings—all while pretending this is about “value.”
💰 The Real Purpose of VBC: Limiting Patient Access
VBC was supposed to revolutionize kidney care. Instead, it has:
Increased administrative burdens on nephrologists, forcing them to justify every decision to middlemen who have never treated a single dialysis patient.
Created more barriers to transplant referrals, because transplants cost insurers more in the short term—even though they save money and lives in the long run.
Pushed home dialysis as a cost-saving measure, not because it’s always best for the patient, but because it’s cheaper for the system.
Allowed private equity-backed coordination companies like Interwell Health to act as gatekeepers, deciding which treatments are “worth” the expense.
🚨 The Criminal Negligence of Alex Azar
Alex Azar’s speech reads like a sales pitch for insurers and corporate medicine, not an actual plan to improve care. He claims VBC is ready for full-scale adoption despite its failures in kidney care. But here’s what Azar conveniently ignores:
Where is the actual patient outcome data? "Increases in home dialysis, depression screening, and waitlisting" mean nothing if patients are still struggling to get transplants and still dying at alarmingly high rates.
Why does he downplay the rationing of care? VBC has created an incentive to deny life-saving treatments, yet Azar frames it as “cost savings.”
Why are insurers and corporate middlemen in charge of patient care? Interwell Health’s entire business model is to profit off denying or delaying access to care—not to improve patient health.
Azar’s push to force VBC into every corner of healthcare is a calculated move to enrich insurers, not protect patients. The fact that he cites kidney care as the model for VBC is terrifying—because kidney patients remain among the most vulnerable, underserved, and exploited populations in U.S. healthcare.
🛑 Patients Are Not Cost Centers. We Are Human Beings.
Value-Based Care is not about value—it’s about maximizing corporate profits by rationing care. If VBC truly worked, we would see better transplant rates, lower mortality, and fewer bureaucratic hurdles—not more corporate interference in patient decisions.
🔴 We need patient-first reform, not more cost-cutting schemes disguised as "value."
🔴 We need transparency in how these programs work—not another black box controlled by insurers and for-profit middlemen.
🔴 We need to dismantle the role of private equity in kidney care—before even more patients die waiting for care they should have received sooner.
Alex Azar, Interwell Health, and every other corporate lobbyist pushing this predatory model of care should be held accountable. The true cost of their greed isn’t just dollars—it’s the lives of kidney patients sacrificed for their bottom line.