The Doctors’ Lounge

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  The Cost Cure: Ashish Jha's Case for Price Caps, Competition, and Biosurveillance 14.09.2026 1t 16min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Anthony DiGiorgio and Anish Koka speak with Dr. Ashish Jha, co-founder and CEO of BioRadar, senior fellow at Harvard Belfer Center, and former White House COVID-19 response coordinator, about the future of American healthcare policy. The conversation moves from hospital pricing and insurance design to Medicaid, HSA-based models, and the political realities that shape what reform is actually possible. They also pivot into a second major topic: biothreat detecti...
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  Congressman Tom Oliverson on 340b, the No Surprises Act, gold carding, and more 07.09.2026 1t 7min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary In this episode of the Doctor's Lounge, Anthony DiGiorgio speaks with Hon. Tom Oliverson, MD, Texas State Representative for House District 130 and chair of the House Republican Caucus. Dr. Oliverson shares how he moved from medicine into public service, why practicing physicians should remain involved in policymaking, and what Texas is doing to address healthcare affordability. They also dig into 340B, prior authorization reform, and the origins of the ...
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  Vinay Prasad: COVID, the FDA, and Why Journalism Keeps Getting Medicine Wrong 01.09.2026 59min

  Send us Fan Mail The prior uploaded file had 26 seconds that was corrupted. Restored on this version! Episode Summary: Dr. Vinay Prasad joins the Doctors Lounge in a recorded in person conversation that moves from his time at the FDA to bigger questions about evidence, incentives, and trust in medicine. The discussion focuses on how regulatory agencies actually function, why public health debates have become so politicized, and whether the current healthcare funding model rewards good c...
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  The Ship Has Sailed: Mike Munger on Medicare, Markets, and Debt 28.08.2026 57min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Duke political economist and podcast host Mike Munger (The Answer is Transaction Costs) joins Anthony DiGiorgio and Anish Koka to argue that what Americans call "health insurance" isn't insurance at all — it's a social program where, as Bastiat put it, everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. Munger walks through why Medicare functions as a bilateral monopoly rather than a market, compares the U.S. system to Germany's competitive-insurer model a...
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  900 Regulatory Hurdles: Why AI Isn't Replacing Doctors Yet 22.08.2026 56min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary With scheduled guest Dr. Geoff Manley pulled away by a medical emergency, hosts Anish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio turn the episode into a news roundtable. They open on a JAMA op-ed by Neil Khosla and Ezekiel Emanuel arguing AI will replace physicians outright, and push back on both the regulatory timeline and the incentive structure behind it — including why hospitals are slow to adopt AI tools that already exist, like AI scribes and pre-charting. From there th...
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  Inside a $207 Million Verdict: What Every Physician Should Know About Malpractice Trials 13.08.2026 1t 3min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary In a special Tuesday episode, Anish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio sit down with Heather Tereshko, a Principal at Post & Schell in Philadelphia and a 25-year veteran of medical malpractice defense, to break down the largest medical malpractice verdict in Pennsylvania history — a $207 million judgment against the University of Pennsylvania stemming from a delayed C-section and resulting anoxic brain injury. Using the case as a launching pad, the three walk thr...
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  Right-to-Try 2.0: Inside the Montana Model with Niklas Anzinger 11.08.2026 1t

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Anish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio sit down with Niklas Anzinger, a venture capitalist and founder of Infinita VC, to unpack Montana SB535 — a new law that lets doctors administer treatments to patients that have only cleared FDA phase one trials, through licensed "experimental treatment centers" overseen by independent review boards. The conversation covers why Eroom's Law has made drug development slower and more expensive despite scientific advances, how the...
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  Dan Donoho on Surgical Data Science, Regulation, and the Humanoid OR 01.08.2026 51min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode SummaryAnthony DiGiorgio and Anish Koka sit down with Dr. Dan Donoho, an NIH-funded neurosurgeon-scientist at Children's National Hospital and George Washington University, and founder of the Surgical Data Science Collective and the Foundation for Digital Neurosurgery, for a wide-ranging conversation on AI in medicine. Donoho explains why surgeons get almost no structured feedback after a case, walks through a randomized controlled trial showing AI-coached medical stu...
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  Dr. George Tolis on Physician Pay, Private Practice, and a Valve Gone Wrong 31.07.2026 1t 14min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. George Tolis, chief of cardiothoracic surgery in Boston, returns to The Doctors Lounge with hosts Dr. Anish Koka and Dr. Anthony DiGiorgio for a wide-ranging conversation that opens with the newly proposed 2027 Medicare physician fee schedule and the budget-neutrality rule dating back to 1989 that forces cuts to one specialty to fund raises to another. The conversation moves into why true independent private practice has effectively ...
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  Cremieux on FDA Reform, Fake Data, and the Columbia Admissions Hack 16.07.2026 54min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode SummaryDrs. Anish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio sit down with independent science writer Cremieux, the pseudonymous Substack author known for auditing primary data and calling out flawed research. The conversation ranges from FDA drug approval reform (Cremieux proposes a two-pathway system separating safety approval from insurer-facing efficacy approval), the divide between well-evidenced GLP-1s and unregulated peptides like BPC-157, and the HRT black-box warning controv...
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  Scott Becker on Building Becker's Healthcare, Physician Supply, and Private Enterprise 11.07.2026 1t 16min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode SummaryAnish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio sit down with Scott Becker, founder of Becker's Healthcare and partner at McGuireWoods, on the business of medicine — his path from healthcare lawyer to media mogul, the real story behind physician supply shortages, why private enterprise (not government) is driving healthcare's real progress, and the debate over breaking up consolidated hospital systems. Chapter Markers00:00 Welcome and introducing Scott Becker 01:22 Origin st...
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  Martin Shkreli on Drug Pricing, Prison, and the Fraud That Shook Pharma 07.07.2026 1t 27min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode SummaryAnish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio sit down with Martin Shkreli — the former hedge fund manager and pharma executive best known for the 2015 Daraprim price increase and his subsequent prison sentence — for a wide-ranging conversation on drug pricing, patent law, and the state of the pharmaceutical industry. Shkreli walks through his path from a teenage hedge fund intern to founding Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals, defends orphan drug economics and the Orphan...
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  Do No Harm: Inside the Fight to Get Identity Politics Out of Medicine 06.07.2026 58min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode SummaryDr. Stanley Goldfarb — nephrologist, former Associate Dean for Curriculum at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, and founder of Do No Harm — joins Drs. Koka and DiGiorgio to trace how medical education drifted from clinical science toward social activism. Goldfarb recounts the battles at Penn that led to his 2019 WSJ op-ed, the professional fallout that followed, and why he built Do No Harm into a 54,000-member organization with an active litigation strategy. T...
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  The Myocarditis Double Standard: COVID, the Vaccine, and the Pediatric Deaths That Went Unreported 02.07.2026 1t 15min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode SummaryDr. Tracy Beth Høeg returns alongside Dr. Venkatesh Murthy, NIH-funded cardiologist at the University of Michigan, to dissect the Senator Ron Johnson congressional memo detailing pediatric deaths following COVID-19 vaccination — deaths the FDA's own pharmacovigilance team flagged internally but never disclosed publicly. The conversation covers the well-documented double standard applied to COVID myocarditis versus vaccine myocarditis, how journal editors killed...
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  David Zweig on Schools, Science, and the Media's COVID Failure 27.06.2026 1t 26min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode SummaryInvestigative journalist David Zweig joins Anish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio to discuss his book An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, The Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions — a heavily cited account of how public health authorities, the media, and a politically homogenous expert class got COVID policy badly wrong, especially for children. The conversation covers why U.S. media coverage was uniquely alarmist compared to the rest of the world, how Americans...
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  Drug Pricing, Broken Incentives, and the 340b program Fixes Washington Won't Touch 20.06.2026 58min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Ryan Long — former senior policy advisor to Speaker Kevin McCarthy and current non-resident senior scholar at the USC Schaefer Institute — joins Drs. Koka and DiGiorgio for a deep dive into the structural failures driving American drug pricing. The conversation covers the list-to-net price bubble and why patients pay cost-sharing on a fictitious number, how the IRA's price-setting mechanism disincentivizes both new drug development and subsequent indications, ...
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  The Atom Bomb Speaks: Tracy Høeg on COVID, Myocarditis, and the FDA From the Inside 10.06.2026 1t 13min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode SummaryDr. Tracy Høeg — physician, epidemiologist, and former Acting Director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research — joins Drs. Koka and DiGiorgio for her first interview since being fired from the agency in May 2025. She traces her unusual path from ophthalmology dropout to professional ultramarathoner to one of the most consequential and contested researchers of the COVID era, walking through her school transmission studies, the myocarditis preprint ...
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  The ER Doc Who Quit the System - and Built His Own 06.06.2026 1t 2min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Dr. Noah Kaufman - board-certified emergency physician with 20 years in the ER, seven seasons on American Ninja Warrior, and a new direct acute care practice in Denver - joins Drs. Koka and DiGiorgio to talk about why he walked away from the employed medicine model and built Cough Care, a cash-pay, fully transparent urgent care. The conversation covers the broken economics of emergency billing, why most urgent care is a race to the bottom, how price signals ch...
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  The Cholesterol Debate: What the Keto Influencers Get Right (and Wrong) 03.06.2026 1t

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Dr. Greg Katz, preventive cardiologist at NYU Langone and co-host of Beyond Journal Club, joins Anish to dissect the online cholesterol debate — specifically the claims made by science communicator Nick Norwitz, who has maintained an LDL over 500 mg/dL on a low-carb diet for seven years with no coronary plaque on CTA. Katz takes the data point seriously, walks through the limitations of coronary CTA and the flawed Keto CTA study, and explains why he still beli...
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  Gaming the System: LTACHs, Guidelines, and the Evidence Problem in American Medicine 31.05.2026 1t 5min

  Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Dr. Anil Makam — hospitalist, health services researcher at UCSF, and faculty at Zuckerberg San Francisco General — joins Drs. Koka and DiGiorgio for a wide-ranging conversation on the hidden mechanics of American healthcare. Makam breaks down long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs): what they're for, how regional variation and perverse payment incentives have distorted their use, and what the 2016 site-neutral payment reforms actually did to the market. The c...