Fixing Healthcare Podcast

American healthcare is approaching an economic reckoning. Or, better yet, a doomsday clock. Spending now exceeds $5.7 trillion annually, medical costs continue to climb and millions of families are struggling to afford care. Yet the people who may be best positioned to improve the system — physicians — are exhausted, overburdened and disengaged.

In this Unfiltered episode of Fixing Healthcare, Drs. Robert Pearl and Jonathan Fisher join cohost Jeremy Corr to confront a difficult question: How can doctors lead the changes healthcare urgently needs when so many are already struggling to get through the workday?

Dr. Pearl begins with...

American healthcare keeps getting more expensive. Insurers respond by restricting access, employers cut benefits and patients pay more out of pocket. Yet the underlying problem remains: chronic diseases continue to drive much of the nation’s medical spending.

In this episode of Diving Deep, co-hosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr explore two technological advances that could help break this cycle. One is already changing how millions of Americans manage their weight. The other could transform how physicians and patients manage chronic disease.

Together, Pearl argues, GLP-1 medications and generative AI offer a new path to...

Dean Ornish’s life was saved by meaning, connection and lifestyle change. Then he spent 50 years proving those same forces can save others.

In this episode of Fixing Healthcare, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr welcome Dr. Dean Ornish, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and one of the most influential figures in lifestyle medicine.

Across his career, Ornish has shown that comprehensive lifestyle changes can help prevent and even reverse major chronic diseases, including heart disease, prostate cancer and, most recently, early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

But this conv...

Fixing Healthcare is revisiting a Diving Deep episode that feels even more important today than when it first aired in November 2023.

At the time, ChatGPT had been available to the public for just one year. Generative AI was still widely viewed as a fascinating but unreliable tool, impressive in some settings and error-prone in others. Many clinicians saw it as a novelty. Some saw it as a threat. Few fully grasped how quickly the technology would advance or how profoundly it might reshape the relationship between doctors and patients.

Nearly three years later, that early...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl dig for the facts beneath healthcare’s biggest headlines. Today’s show opens with a problem more Americans are facing every year: rising out-of-pocket costs and the growing demand that patients pay before they receive care.

Pearl explains that the listener’s concern is increasingly the rule, not the exception. Total health costs per employee now average more than $20,000 a year, including premiums and out-of-pocket obligations. With projections for next year showing costs rising another 9% to 11%, workers are likely to shoulder an even...

With healthcare costs projected to rise sharply next year, Fixing Healthcare with cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr revisits one of the most popular conversations of the year: an interview with Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, longtime Shark Tank investor, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks and founder of Cost-Plus Drugs.

Cuban has built his healthcare work around a deceptively simple idea: patients, employers and clinicians should be able to see what things actually cost.

That should not be radical. But in American healthcare, transparency can feel disruptive because so much of the system depends on...

With all the turmoil surrounding healthcare and artificial intelligence, the Fixing Healthcare team is revisiting one of its most provocative conversations: an interview with entrepreneur, investor and technology visionary Vinod Khosla.

When Khosla appeared on the show in November 2024, he made a claim that drew immediate criticism from many in medicine: “The most expensive part of the healthcare system is expertise. And expertise can be tamed with AI.”

At the time, many listeners and social media commenters saw the statement as overly optimistic, even dismissive of the complexity of clinical care. Today, it sounds less like...

In this episode of Fixing Healthcare, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr welcome back Dr. Rod Rohrich, an internationally recognized plastic surgeon, former editor-in-chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and national leader in the application and safety of social media for medical advancement.

Dr. Rohrich, a returning guest (FHC #57), focuses now on the healthcare concerns most affecting Americans today. Drawing on his experience with patients, physicians and a massive social media audience, Rohrich identifies three questions he hears most often:

In this Diving Deep episode, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr examine two very different healthcare debates that share a common problem: when medicine lacks good evidence and aligned incentives, patients and doctors are left with bad choices.

The conversation begins with experimental peptides, a fast-growing topic on social media and in wellness circles. Dr. Pearl reviews the FDA’s ongoing debate over whether six experimental peptides should be made available to licensed compounding pharmacies. Supporters argue that Americans are already buying these substances through the gray market, often from overseas suppliers, and that regulated access would be...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl go in search of the facts beneath healthcare’s biggest headlines. Today’s show opens with one of the hottest and least understood medical topics: experimental peptides.

Pearl explains that an FDA advisory committee narrowly recommended allowing compounding pharmacies to provide six experimental peptides to patients. This is not the same as traditional FDA approval. Rather than reviewing a drug through the usual three-phase clinical trial process, the recommendation would allow suppliers to provide peptide ingredients that compounding pharmacies could use to fil...

In this Unfiltered episode of Fixing Healthcare, Drs. Robert Pearl and Jonathan Fisher join cohost Jeremy Corr for a wide-ranging conversation about burnout, kindness, leadership, medical errors and what American healthcare can learn from other nations.

The episode begins with Fisher’s recent trip to Australia, where he joined physicians and other healthcare professionals for a program focused on individual well-being, organizational well-being and burnout. Held near Uluru, on sacred Aboriginal land, the gathering included conversations with tribal elders about the connection between land, culture, traditional remedies and healing.

Fisher explains that some Australian hospitals ha...

Dr. Austin Chiang has built one of medicine’s most distinctive public platforms.

He is a triple board-certified gastroenterologist, Chief Medical Officer for Medtronic’s Endoscopy business and Associate Professor of Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. He is also one of healthcare’s most influential physician voices online, with hundreds of thousands of followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

That makes him an ideal guest for Season 11 of Fixing Healthcare with cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr. This season asks what patients, clinicians and healthcare leaders are saying now that feels meaningfully different from t...

In this Diving Deep episode, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr examine two big questions facing American medicine: how generative AI can make healthcare more affordable and what the World Cup can teach doctors about strategy, teamwork and leadership.

The conversation begins with a counterintuitive point: In other industries, technology often lowers costs by allowing companies to produce the same output with fewer workers. But Dr. Pearl knows medicine is different. In healthcare, the biggest costs arise when preventable and controllable conditions turn into life-threatening complications. Therefore, he does not believe GenAI’s greatest financial value in he...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl dig for the facts beneath healthcare’s biggest headlines. Today’s show opens with the issue most likely to shape how Americans think about healthcare heading into the midterm elections: affordability.

Dr. Pearl explains that medical costs have now reached $5.7 trillion, rising more than 7% for the third consecutive year. Federal actuaries project that healthcare spending could approach $9 trillion by 2034, accounting for more than 20% of the U.S. GDP. For voters, employers, patients and families, those numbers aren’t just an endless string o...

In this Unfiltered episode of Fixing Healthcare, Drs. Robert Pearl and Jonathan Fisher explore what medicine can learn from positive psychology, elite sports teams and the daily pressures facing clinicians, leaders and patients.

The conversation begins with Fisher’s recent trip to Ireland, where he spoke at a conference on positive psychology, organizational well-being and leadership. Fisher explains that positive psychology is not simply about optimism or self-help. At its best, the field asks a more useful question: What can we learn from people, teams and organizations that are already flourishing?

That shift applies greatly in...

Dr. Jerry Penso leads one of the most influential organizations in American healthcare. As president and CEO of AMGA, the American Medical Group Association, Penso represents 440 medical groups and health systems that care for nearly 100 million Americans.

That vantage point makes him an ideal guest for Season 11 of Fixing Healthcare with cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr.

This season’s guests are being asked what they are hearing from patients, clinicians and healthcare leaders right now. For Penso, three concerns rise above the rest:

In this Diving Deep episode, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr explore what a breakthrough in mathematics can teach healthcare about generative AI, outdated assumptions and the future of medical practice.

The conversation begins with Paul Erdős, the brilliant Hungarian mathematician whose unit-distance problem stumped experts for 80 years. Generations of mathematicians tried to prove Erdős’ conjecture using the tools and assumptions of geometry. Then OpenAI announced that one of its models had found a different path, one that challenged the assumptions of humans.

For Pearl, the lesson for medicine is not about math. It i...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl probe the facts beneath healthcare’s biggest headlines. Today’s show opens with a scientific breakthrough that could change the future of inherited disease: a new gene-editing technique that may allow researchers to correct DNA errors in human embryos with far greater precision than earlier CRISPR approaches.

Dr. Pearl explains that the advance, developed by researchers at Columbia University, uses a method called base editing. Unlike traditional CRISPR, which cuts out and replaces sections of DNA, base editing can alter individual nucleo...

In this Unfiltered episode of Fixing Healthcare, Drs. Robert Pearl and Jonathan Fisher join cohost Jeremy Corr for a fascinating conversation about the physician’s mind, the promise and limits of generative AI, and what medicine risks losing when technology advances faster than humans can tolerate.

In this episode, Pearl turns to a realization he had during a recent hiking trip in Portugal: his brain felt different while walking through the woods than it does while solving analytical problems.

That observation leads to a deeper discussion of “left brain” and “right brain” thinking in medicine. Fisher exp...

Dr. Anthony “Mazz” Mazzarelli brings a rare combination of perspectives to American healthcare: physician, executive, lawyer, bioethicist, author and media voice.

As co-president and CEO of Cooper University Health Care and associate dean of clinical affairs at Cooper Medical School, Mazzarelli leads a major safety-net health system while continuing to see patients himself. He is also co-author of Compassionomics, a book that makes the evidence-based case that compassion in medicine improves outcomes, lowers costs and reduces clinician burnout.

That combination makes him an ideal guest for Fixing Healthcare with cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr...

In this Diving Deep episode, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr examine the rapid advance of generative AI, along with the growing conflict between medicine’s mission to heal and doctors’ need for financial security.

The conversation begins with a question now echoing across every profession: Will AI replace highly trained workers? In medicine, Dr. Pearl argues, the answer is less about replacement than redefinition. Drawing on recent changes in software development, he explains how “vibe coding” has allowed programmers to stop writing much of the code themselves and instead use generative AI to build, test and refine a...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl probe the facts beneath healthcare’s biggest headlines. Today’s show examines the accelerating progress of generative AI, the political turmoil inside America’s leading health agencies and the infectious disease threats testing the nation’s public health readiness.

The conversation opens with a listener question about how close generative AI is to matching clinicians. Dr. Pearl explains that the technology is advancing faster than he predicted in ChatGPT, MD, with recent research showing an OpenAI model outperforming experienced physicians on emergency...

In this Unfiltered episode of Fixing Healthcare, Drs. Robert Pearl and Jonathan Fisher explore three questions that reach across medicine, leadership and life itself: What legacy do physicians leave behind? How does mindset shape health and longevity? And can doctors still find fulfillment as medical practice shifts from independence to employment?

The conversation begins with Tim Cook’s legacy at Apple, using his tenure as CEO to ask a larger question about values, mission and compromise. Pearl and Fisher examine whether legacy is something others assign after a career ends or something professionals create daily through their ch...

Fixing Healthcare hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl are revisiting a past episode of Diving Deep while Dr. Pearl travels and keynotes events around the world. And like last week’s replay, this conversation was selected for a reason.

Originally recorded more than three years ago, this episode explores two issues that remain central to the future of American medicine: how healthcare leaders respond to technological change and whether the nation can finally move be

For the next two weeks, Fixing Healthcare hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl will be replaying past episodes of Diving Deep while Dr. Pearl travels and keynotes events around the world. But these aren’t random reruns. They were selected for a reason: to highlight just how quickly technology is advancing and how slowly healthcare is adapting.

This week’s flashback revisits a July 2024 conversation recorded shortly after OpenAI released GPT-4o, a major leap forward in generative AI at the time. Less than two years later, the pace of change is striking. Capabilities that once felt...

In this Diving Deep episode, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr dissect two issues that are often discussed separately but are deeply intertwined: how Americans can live longer, healthier lives and how the nation can make healthcare more affordable.

The conversation begins with longevity. As interest in lifespan and “healthspan” grows, Dr. Pearl challenges three widely held beliefs that, in his view, are holding Americans back. First, the idea that physical and cognitive decline is inevitable with age. New research suggests that nearly half of older adults improve over time, particularly when they maintain a positive outlook and...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl probe the facts beneath healthcare biggest headlines. Today’s show features an in-depth look at sweeping federal budget cuts, the expanding (and often misunderstood) impact of GLP-1 medications and what’s destabilizing health coverage.

The conversation opens with a stark warning. Dr. Pearl reviews the president’s proposed 2027 budget, which includes a $15.8 billion reduction in healthcare spending. He explains why cuts to Medicaid, NIH research and global health programs could have consequences that extend far beyond the next fiscal year, potentially slowing...

OpenAI didn’t need to convince patients to try generative AI.

According to Dr. Nate Gross, Health of Health at OpenAI, 230 million people already use ChatGPT each week to interpret lab results, prepare for visits, understand diagnoses or ask health-related questions they didn’t have time (or confidence) to raise in the exam room.

But what about clinicians?

On this episode of Fixing Healthcare, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr speak with Dr. Gross, who previously co-founded Doximity and Rock Health, about OpenAI’s latest step: the release of ChatGPT for Clinicians, a new of...

In this Unfiltered episode of Fixing Healthcare, Drs. Robert Pearl and Jonathan Fisher join cohost Jeremy Corr to explore one of medicine’s least discussed forces: how professional culture gradually reshapes physician identity.

The conversation begins with relationships using an unlikely touchpoint: FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. Using marriage, friendship, doctor-patient dynamics and colleague trust as a launching point, Pearl and Fisher examine how stress, burnout and emotional spillover affect the people clinicians care about both at home and at work. Fisher draws on his retreat work with healthcare professionals to explain why...

In this Diving Deep episode, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr connect two forces that are beginning to reshape the future of medicine: healthcare’s worsening economic inefficiency and the rise of physician-built generative AI tools.

The conversation opens with a provocative interpretation of the latest U.S. jobs reports. While healthcare has become the nation’s primary engine of employment growth, Dr. Pearl argues that this is not a sign of strength. It is evidence that medicine continues to meet rising demand by adding labor instead of improving productivity. In his view, that failure to modernize is d...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl balance two sides of American healthcare: the encouraging scientific advances that could help people live longer and healthier lives, and the growing affordability and trust crises threatening patients across the country.

The conversation opens on an optimistic note. Dr. Pearl highlights new Yale research showing that aging is far less deterministic than many Americans assume. Rather than a steady and unavoidable decline, the study found that nearly half of adults over 65 improved physically, cognitively or both over a 12-year period.

...

Dr. John Whyte has spent his career at the intersection of medicine, media and public policy. Now, as CEO of the American Medical Association, he hears firsthand what physicians, patients and health leaders are most concerned about and what they expect from the future of healthcare.

That perspective makes him an ideal guest for Season 11 of Fixing Healthcare with cohosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr.

This season’s guests bring more than impressive résumés and large social-media followings. They bring insight into what people across the country are actually talking about: the fear...

In this Unfiltered episode of Fixing Healthcare, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr sit down with cardiologist and mindfulness expert Dr. Jonathan Fisher for a wide-ranging conversation about leadership, strategy and the future of physician influence in American medicine.

The discussion begins with a challenge to a popular point of view: that empathy, transparency and trust make for an effective leader in medicine. While those qualities matter, Dr. Pearl argues that healthcare also requires strategic thinking, operational discipline and the ability to align people around a common direction. In medicine, says Dr. Fisher, many physicians are taught...

In this Diving Deep episode, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Cor return to a question listeners have been asking for months: What role will generative AI realistically play in American healthcare?

Dr. Pearl opens the discussion around three urgent threats that, if ignored, may soon become too large and too expensive to solve:

This examination offers a stark warning about healthcare’s lack of flexibility. Unlike most industries, medicine cannot quickly reconfigure its workforce, adopt new care models or cu...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl unpack a wide range of developments shaping healthcare in America today, including the TrumpRx drug discount program.

From new legislation affecting telehealth and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to the rapid spread of measles and growing public concern about vaccine policy, this month’s discussion highlights the policy decisions and scientific debates influencing medicine right now.

The episode opens with the latest federal legislation passed to avert a government shutdown. While healthcare was not the central focus of this particular poli...

Season 11 of Fixing Healthcare continues its shift away from the traditional top-down model of interviewing CEOs, policymakers and medical leaders to focus this week on something new, different and fascinating: listening to the generation that is inheriting this American healthcare system.

In this episode, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr speak with Grace Lynn Keller, VP at Executive Podcast Solutions, former Miss America contestant and the show’s first-ever Gen Z guest.

Grace brings a rare vantage point: Professionally, she is immersed in conversations with healthcare executives. Personally, she is part of the generation that co...

In this Unfiltered episode of Fixing Healthcare, hosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr sit down with cardiologist and mindfulness expert Dr. Jonathan Fisher for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, culture and team performance, inspired by lessons from the movie F1.

What begins as a discussion about racing quickly becomes a deep exploration of how high-performing teams operate under pressure. In the movie (and in real Formula 1 racing), success depends not on a single star driver but on flawless coordination, communication and shared accountability. The same, the trio argues, is true in healthcare where patient outcomes increasingly...

In this week’s episode of Medicine: The Truth, hosts Jeremy Corr and Dr. Robert Pearl examine a sweeping set of developments shaping American healthcare. From the first state-approved use of generative AI to prescribe medications without human oversight to rising healthcare costs, from worsening vaccine misinformation to the stubborn persistence of preventable disease, this show focuses on biggest stories in medicine today.

The episode opens with a groundbreaking and controversial pilot program in Utah that allows a generative AI system to renew prescriptions for chronic disease without physician involvement.

From there, the conversation turns to...

This Diving Deep episode with Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr looks at U.S. healthcare across three time horizons: past, present and future.

The hosts use 2025 as a case study in disruption without reform, 2026 as a year of mounting pressure and near-term transition, and the coming decade as a period when generative AI will fundamentally reshape how medicine is practiced.

Looking back at 2025

Dr. Pearl argues that despite political upheaval, executive orders, agency shakeups and constant headlines, American healthcare ended the year largely unchanged. Just more expensive and less trusted. He walks...

As part of Season 11 of Fixing Healthcare, which spotlights influential voices with large followings and direct insight into how real people experience medicine, Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr welcome back medical historian Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris for her third appearance on the show, this time joined by her husband and creative partner, illustrator Adrian Teal.

Together, Lindsey and Adrian bring a rare combination of scholarly depth, storytelling and massive digital reach. Lindsey’s work on medical history has captivated millions across books, television and social platforms, while Adrian’s instantly recognizable art has built a massive following onli...