Dutch Rojas Found $71.8 Million of Your Money.
It was in your pocket. The middleman took it. This week we showed you exactly how Dutch can help you get it back.
1. “$71.8 Million. That’s How Much the Middleman Took From You” (Feb 6, Paid) The independence tax quantified. A 50-person independent practice pays $480,000 more annually than an identical hospital-system facility. Same carrier, same coverage, same risk profile. Over a 30-year career, that structural penalty compounds to $71.8 million in lost wealth. The piece frames this as engineered economic pressure, not market inefficiency, and introduces the MedMerge thesis: infrastructure aggregation that captures hospital-system economics without surrendering ownership. Pilot data: 85% Rx cost reduction, $1.4M returned to physicians in year one.
2. “When the Smart Money Sells, Your Government Buys” (Feb 3, Audio/Free) The OU Health acquisition through a behavioral economics lens. HCA exits Oklahoma. SSM Health spends six months on due diligence and walks away without an offer. Then the state pays $825 million — $75 million over the court-approved price — with no amended petition and no public explanation. Frames the transaction through Friedman’s four ways to spend money: category four (other people’s money on other people). The question: if the smartest operator in healthcare is selling, why is your government buying?
3. “$825 Million for a Junk-Rated Hospital: The OU Health Transaction” (Feb 3, Paid) The deeper dive on the same transaction. Covers the $1.5 billion in accumulated debt, Moody’s B3 (junk) downgrade in January 2023, $463-493 million in annual subsidies post-conversion, and the $96 million appropriation increase after the downgrade. The conversion flipped a tax-paying HCA entity into a tax-consuming nonprofit. Same hospital, opposite economics.
4. “Five Economists Diagnosed American Healthcare. They Found the Same Disease.” (Feb 2, Paid) The prologue to THE PATTERN series. Sowell, Friedman, Hayek, Rand, and Ferguson each diagnose the same phenomenon: soft nationalization. State university health systems are absorbing private medicine not through competition but through acquisition, funded by taxpayer dollars. Sets up the OU Health case study as Exhibit A and previews the national pattern (Michigan, Arizona, Tennessee, Vanderbilt).
5. “What Happened to Morality” (Feb 1, Free/Sunday) The contemplative Sunday piece. Opens with Yeats (”The best lack all conviction”), threads through Eliot’s hollow men, and lands on Kipling. Personal register: your Marine experience, fatherhood, watching amoral decision-makers operate with no file, no foundation. The core distinction: the insurance executive who denies care isn’t evil — they’re hollow. A profession has a code you inherit. A job is an exchange. When medicine became a “provider network,” something unnamed was lost.
The Numbers This Week
LinkedIn:
164,326 impressions. Up 93.1%. 93,158 members reached. Up 161.5%. Top post hit 68,738 impressions with 503 reactions and 150 comments. 27,289 followers, 38% in hospitals and healthcare, 32% senior leadership, 12% CXO/CEO level.
X:
383.6K impressions this week. 31K followers. 7.3K verified. 26.3M lifetime impressions. 4.9% engagement rate.
Combined: Over half a million impressions across two platforms in seven days. Zero ad spend.
What’s Coming Next Week
The OU Health investigation goes national. Michigan and North Carolina are next. Same playbook. Different state seals. Plus two interviews: one with two vascular surgeons who actually operate, and one with one of my favorite investors who actually deploys capital. Full week.
-Rojas out