Loneliness isn’t just a feeling - it’s a public health crisis. The number of hours we spend with friends is rapidly decreasing, more and more Americans report feeling lonely, and loneliness is linked to bad health outcomes like risk of premature death, heart disease, stroke, depression and anxiety. Kasley Killam, author of “The Art and Science and Connection”, joins us to talk about why social health should be the third pillar of wellness alongside physical and mental health.

We discuss:

• The surprising finding that connected communities were more resilient during the COVID pandemic
• Kasley’s 100+ day experiment with acts of kindness
• How small investments in social health have big ripple effects
• Her nuanced views on AI companions

Kasley talks about how vulnerability is key to building trust and human connection:

“When you share something a little vulnerable that goes beyond… surface level and small talk, that is like this magical way of deepening connections, right? It builds trust, it builds intimacy, it makes us relatable, it helps us get to know each other better. And so … there I am with a complete stranger who… I've maybe shared something on stage or in conversation, they're now sharing something really intimate and vulnerable about their life and that just creates this beautiful moment. ”

Relevant Links

• Grab Kasley’s book “The Art and Science of Connection”
• See Kasley’s TED talk: Why Social Health is Key to Happiness and Longevity
• Get more info on the APA poll on social connection
• Read an Article on Kasley’s 108-day experiment with acts of kindness
• Read the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness as a pandemic
• See this Article on Scan Health Plan’s “Togetherness” program

About Our Guest

Kasley Killam is a leading expert in social health and author of The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier. As a Harvard-trained social scientist, 2X TED speaker, sought-after advisor, and award-winning founder, Killam has been dedicated to improving well-being through human connection for nearly 15 years. Globally recognized for her thought leadership on social health, Killam’s collaborations with top organizations like Google, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Economic Forum contribute to building more socially healthy products, workplaces, and communities. Discover her insights in outlets like The New York Times, Forbes, NPR, CNBC, and The Washington Post and join her newsletter community at www.kasleykillam.com.

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What if instead of treating illness we also confronted the reasons Americans get sick in the first place? That’s the origin of this podcast and also the four billion dollar question Dr. Bechara Choucair is tackling at Kaiser Permanente as Chief Community Health Officer. He joins Claudia to talk about the organization’s focus on climate change and health, workforce pipelines and addressing unmet social needs.

We discuss:

• The surprising fact that two-thirds of KP’s members (who are mostly covered by employer insurance) have at least one unmet social need
• How the Common Health Coalition is building bridges between healthcare and public health
• What KP is doing to tackle a big problem limiting the mental health workforce: only 57% of masters trained therapists get licensed
• What it took for KP to achieve carbon neutrality

Bechara reminds us that bridge-building is a crucial part of this community health work:

“We need more and more bridges between public health and healthcare... [They have] operated as two separate disciplines operating in their own silos... [When] there is a public health emergency we build more bridges, we strengthen those bridges that already exist. And then when that public health emergency subsides, we all retreat into our own disciplines and we continue that siloed journey.”

Relevant Links

• Read about the NAM initiative on climate change and health
• Explore why the US needs more community health workers from this article
• Learn more about the Common Health Coalition
• Dive into details on KP’s sustainability journey

About Our Guest

Dr. Bechara Choucair, MD, is executive vice president and chief community health officer for Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Hospitals — known as Kaiser Permanente, one of America’s leading integrated health care providers and not-for-profit health plans. Dr. Choucair oversees the organization’s national community health efforts and philanthropic giving activities aimed at improving the health of its 12.2 million members and the 68 million people within the communities it serves.

Previously, Dr. Choucair served as senior vice president, Safety Net and Community Health, at Trinity Health, and was the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.

Dr. Choucair, a family physician by training, completed his Family Practice Residency at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He holds an MD from the American University of Beirut and a master’s degree in health care management from the University of Texas at Dallas.

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The US leads the world in biomedical innovation, with about 40% of patents being filed by US scientists and companies. The FDA plays a critical role in supporting and enabling this innovation pipeline and our guest Dr. Robert Califf was commissioner of the agency not once, but twice under Presidents Obama and Biden. He joins us to talk about what Americans should know about FDA’s critical role and the threats to its functioning from the dramatic cuts the Trump administration has made over the last three months.

We discuss:

• The broad sweep of FDA’s purview from drugs and medical devices to cosmetics, food, tobacco and dog food
• Concern that the FDA is now “decapitated and eviscerated” from the massive and multiple rounds of dismissals
• While most industries want less regulation, the pharma industry wants more information and guidance from the FDA
• Califf has been affiliated with Duke for 50 of its 100 years, but a part of his heart is still with Clemson

What would Califf’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda be?

“We need to develop reliable, repetitive sources of information that help people do things that are healthy and beneficial. That part of MAHA I like a lot…The second thing is… I'm developing connections with people who are thinking differently about primary care because I think everybody agrees there's no way you can take the current workforce and deliver what's needed. So it's got to be linked up with AI and digital technologies, but also with a very different looking workforce that gets paid differently, has more respect.”

Relevant Links

• Read Califf’s WSJ opinion letter: “Work with the Bureaucracy, Not Against It”
• Peter Marks’ resignation letter
• NYT article on the impact of FDA layoffs
• Califf’s “Public Health on Call” podcast episode on the state of the FDA
• Opinion article from 7 previous FDA commissioners on how recent changes are undermining credibility of the FDA

About Our Guest

Robert M. Califf, MD served as FDA Commmissioner under Presidents Biden and Obama. Califf is a nationally recognized expert in cardiovascular medicine, health outcomes research, health care quality, and clinical research, and a leader in the growing field of translational research. Prior to rejoining the FDA in 2022, Califf was head of medical strategy and senior advisor at Alphabet, contributing to strategy and policy for its health subsidiaries Verily Life Sciences and Google Health. Prior to Alphabet, he was professor of medicine and vice chancellor for clinical and translational research at Duke University, director of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute, and founding director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Dr. Califf is a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine. He completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a fellowship in cardiology at Duke.

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Could primary care at home unlock better health and lower costs for American families? Rebekah Gee, a physician and policymaker turned entrepreneur, joins us to talk about the big bet her company Nest Health is making on home-based primary care. It’s a model that makes sense for families and delivers results. In the first year of operations Nest doubled primary care visits, reduced ER visits, and increased childhood immunizations.

We discuss:

• The sound economics behind the Medicaid expansion in Louisiana
• What she learned from her mentor, astronaut John Glenn
• How to close the primary care gap for children and parents
• Whether ultra processed foods are the next tobacco

Rebekah shared about an exchange with Elon Musk on the short sightedness of Medicaid cuts:

“So Nest came out with our savings numbers. We put out some really good information about the health of children and the opportunities. And Elon Musk retweeted it. So as a result of that, we actually got a lot of press. But I wrote back to him and said, ‘I'm glad you like this concept. And just remember, don't cut health care for children because we'll be paying far more for that than you will ever save.’ ”

Relevant Links

• Read more about Nest Health
• Watch: Dr. Rebekah Gee on what entrepreneurs need to know about Medicaid
• Learn about Alaska’s Nuka system of care
• Evidence from the Nurse Family Partnership about the impact of home-based care

About Our Guest

Dr. Rebekah Gee is the founder and CEO of Nest Health, a technology-enabled whole-family primary care provider providing care at home and virtually to Americans who struggle to receive comprehensive care. Previously, Dr. Gee served as Secretary of Health for the State of Louisiana. In that cabinet-level role, she led the expansion of Medicaid. As Secretary, she was responsible for nearly half the state budget including Medicaid, public health, aging and adult services, licensure, sanitation, disability services, and a nearly 2,000 bed state hospital system. As Secretary, she developed a first-in-the-nation subscription model for the drugs that cure Hepatitis C that is being used as a national and international model for increased drug access and affordability.

Dr. Gee has served as an advisor to multiple Governors, presidential campaigns, and policy efforts at the state and national level. Her board service includes medical advisory support of public companies Select Quote and 3D systems. She has also served as a board member or advisor to Ready Responders, Ouva, Noble, NCQA, NQF, IHI, the Penn Center for Behavioral Economics, and the Duke-Margolis Institute.

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Whether it's the civil rights movement, marriage equality or even seatbelt laws, community organizing is how change happens in America. In this encore episode, Dr. Tony Iton shares a masterclass in how social, political and economic power shape health outcomes and how to meaningfully shift those dynamics when it matters most. Tony argues that reinvigorating democracy at the community and local level is where we should be doubling down. This episode was impactful when it was first released but is even more relevant and timely now.

We discuss:

• The ABC’s of health for all: agency, belonging and social contracts
• How California communities applied this framework to dramatically change school climate and reduce suspensions
• The role of narrative in shaping policy choices towards belonging or exclusion

Tony digs into why power matters in health:

“We're talking about essentially community-level power, what we refer to as community agency, and we basically theorized that if we could build social, political and economic power in a critical mass of people in 14 low-income communities that have documented health disparities, that we could improve the health status of those populations over a 10-year period… We weren't thinking that there was something that we needed to do to people. In other words, it wasn't like increasing access to healthcare or, you know, enhancing the quality of public health education. This was fundamentally about unleashing the power of communities to [determine how resources are distributed].“

Relevant Links

• Read about our UC Berkeley School of Public Health Social Impact Fellows (Tony included)
• Learn more about the California Endowment
• Visit Dr. Tony Iton’s website
• Read Dr. Tony Iton’s “Understanding How Health Happens – Your Zip Code is More Important Than Your Genetic Code” by Dr. Tony Iton, MD, JD, MPH and Robert K. Ross, MD.
• Order “Advocacy for Public Health Policy Change: An Urgent Imperative” which is co-authored by Dr. Tony Iton

About Our Guest

Dr. Tony Iton is a Social Impact Fellow and lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He was the Senior Vice President of Programs & Partnerships at The California Endowment from October 2009 to June 2024.

Prior to his appointment at The Endowment, Iton served from 2003 as both the director and County Health Officer for the Alameda County Public Health Department. In that role, he oversaw the creation of an innovative public health practice designed to eliminate health disparities by tackling the root causes of poor health that limit quality of life and lifespan in many of California's low-income communities.

Iton also served for three years as director of Health and Human Services and School Medical Advisor for the City of Stamford, Connecticut. Concurrent to that, he also served as a physician in internal medicine for Stamford Hospital's HIV Clinic. In addition, Iton served for five years as a primary care physician for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Iton's varied career also includes past service as a staff attorney...

California is full of hardworking people—nurses, teachers, delivery drivers, baristas—who keep our communities running. Many of them live paycheck-to-paycheck, making too much to qualify for most government benefits, but not enough to afford the basics. For nearly 2 million Californians, Covered California provides a critical lifeline, offering access to affordable health insurance and now basic needs support. Dr. Monica Soni, Chief Medical Officer of Covered California, joins Claudia to talk about the program’s important and expanding role in the California landscape.

We discuss:

• What the working poor really need: breathing room in their budgets to afford healthy food
• Operating a startup within government
• How collaboration across Covered California, Medi-Cal and CalPERS – which together cover 45% of Californians – will drive faster and more aligned health improvement in California

Monica’s team uses experiments and user research to shape every aspect of the program:

“But I do think in our DNA is this idea of innovation. In-house, we have a research team that does randomized controlled trials. We're committed to hyper transparency. Almost all of our data is released. We stratify it by everything we can think of to really identify where there might be pockets of coverage that aren't there or outcomes that are suboptimal. And we do a lot of deep listening with consumers and with the community to help inform what we do.“

Relevant Links

• Read more about Covered California’s Innovative Program to Improve Population Health
• See the details on Covered California’s Data and Research tools
• Announcement of the launch of Covered Californians Population Health Investments
• More info on how Covered California uses email nudges for enrollment

About Our Guest

Dr. S. Monica Soni is the Chief Medical Officer, and a Chief Deputy Executive Director at Covered California, leading the organization’s Health Equity and Quality Transformation division. In this capacity she is responsible for health equity, health care strategy, medical policy, and other clinical operations to continuously improve not only the health services provided through Covered California’s contracted health plans, but also California’s delivery system.

She is a board-certified internal medicine physician with more than a decade of experience working in both inpatient and outpatient settings and continues to see patients. She is an Associate Professor within the UCLA Department of Medicine and the Charles R. Drew University Department of Internal Medicine, where she is committed to residency diversification and pipeline development.

Prior to joining Covered California, Dr. Soni served as Associate Chief Medical Officer within Evolent Health focused on the delivery of high-quality, cost-effective specialty care for the over 16 million supported Medicaid lives across the United States. During her time at the organization, she played a critical role in clinical informatics, provider engagement, value-based strategies and innovation. Dr. Soni also served as the Director of Specialty Care for the Los Angeles County Department of Health

In the wake of massive layoffs at HHS - and so many other federal agencies and programs - we are sharing the powerful stories of federal workers who had no choice but to leave their important work when they were fired post-election. You’ll hear from a former marine who was improving primary care for fellow veterans, a child of farmworkers who was expanding economic opportunities for rural communities and a technologist who was improving the organ transplant distribution system. They used their exquisite talents to help communities thrive and connect people with care they desperately needed. And now they aren’t.

Relevant Links

If you’re interested in hiring one of the amazing leaders who shared their story in this episode, connect with them on LinkedIn:

Andrew Lennox: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlennoxmi/

Aileen Wood: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aileen-wood-163585108/

Jesus Morillo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesusmurillo97/

Amy Paris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-paris-4950831/

Ashley Hackett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-hackett/

Jennifer Robinson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-robinson-phd-mph/

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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn

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With the House approving a plan to slash $880 billion from the federal budget, all eyes are turning to Medicaid as the most likely source of cuts. I asked former North Carolina Health Secretary Kody Kinsley, KFF’s Larry Levitt and California Health Care Foundation’s Katie Heidorn to join me to discuss the likely shape and impact of proposed cuts, and take questions from UC Berkeley students.

Kody called it a “self-licking ice cream cone”—cuts that destabilize the government, leading to further cuts. Larry warned of formula battles that will soon erupt. Katie laid out the devastating effects on state budgets.

We’ve also released this episode as a full video episode on YouTube. Subscribe to The Other 80 YouTube channel for video extras, video episodes and viral healthcare policy content. Click here to watch this episode in full.

Watch the full VIDEO version of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X110GShMTtE&t=52s

Relevant Links

• KFF: The Public’s View on Potential Changes to Medicaid
• KFF: Impact of Medicaid Per Capita Cap
• Kody Kinsley testimony to Congress on Medicaid
• Pre-election episode with Larry Levitt
• KFF: Can Republicans cut $880 Billion without Slashing Medicaid?
• CBPP: Impact of Medicaid Cuts
• CHCF: Defending Medi-Cal in 2025

About Our Guests

Katie Heidorn is the director of state health policy at CHCF, where she leverages the foundation’s data, expertise, and partnerships to help California’s state government make informed decisions about health care. Katie is based in CHCF’s Sacramento office.

Katie has nearly two decades of experience working in health policy, government, and nonprofits and is a skilled leader, facilitator, and communicator. She comes to CHCF after more than two years as executive director for the Insure the Uninsured Project (ITUP). Before that, Katie was the government affairs advocate for Health Net and the development director and policy lead at the nonprofit California Coverage and Health Initiatives. Katie spent a decade in California state government, including as a deputy secretary for the California Health and Human Services Agency and principal consultant in the Senate Appropriations Committee. She is also an alumna of the California Senate Fellows Program.

Katie received her master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Southern California and bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis.

Source: https://www.chcf.org/person/katie-heidorn/

Kody...