Live Thursdays 12pm ET · First episode July 2026

The show for the 30 million people who work in healthcare.

Live every week, in plain English — drugs, insurance, hospitals, AI, and what people are actually doing for their health.

one email a week,
easy to forward
you're on the list.

First issue lands before the first show. It's the kind you forward.

Streaming live on
The HCN live desk — Cédric and Danish with guest Otto Sipe of Photon Health
● The desk — live Thursdays, 12pm ET
On the rundown this summer
Biotech
Retatrutide: 24% weight loss in trials
Consumer
1 in 8 American adults has used a GLP-1
Consumer
BPC-157 and the peptide gray market
Biotech
GLP-1s for addiction, apnea, and MASH
Insurance
ACA premiums jump 20% as subsidies lapse
Insurance
Medicare Advantage retreats, county by county
Regulation
V28 fully phased in — who loses?
Policy
Medicare negotiates Ozempic's price
Pharma
100% pharma tariffs on the table
Pharma
Pegging US drug prices to Europe's
M&A
Is UnitedHealth too big to exist?
M&A
Hospital megamergers are back
Tech
Every doctor gets an AI scribe
Tech
Epic builds an AI for everything
Regulation
AI prior auth: 90% of denials overturned
Consumer
$2,500 full-body MRIs go mainstream
Consumer
CGMs for people without diabetes
Consumer
Longevity clinics hit the strip mall
Provider
700 rural hospitals at risk of closing
Investors
Private equity after Steward's collapse
What the show is

Industry news, treated like it matters — and like it's allowed to be interesting.

Live, weekly, fast

90 minutes. 3–6 expert guests. Rapid-fire topic blocks — Around the Horn, for healthcare. The best ideas don't get buried in hour-long monologues.

The whole story

Insurance and biotech and hospitals and what your neighbor heard on a podcast — it's one system. We cover it like one system.

Actually fun

Candid, opinionated, and allergic to jargon. Real debates with real stakes — because if a topic can't survive plain English, it isn't understood yet.

"Industry execs will be shocked when they find out how many people get more health guidance from Andrew Huberman than from their doctor."
"You can't improve what you can't describe in practical terms."
— Cédric & Danish Read the letter →
Be a guest

Say the thing you can't say on a conference stage.

HCN guests are operators, founders, clinicians, investors, and regulators who can explain their corner of healthcare in plain English — with opinions attached. No panels, no platitudes, no 40-slide decks.

The right room

The audience is the industry — payer and provider executives, founders, investors, policy people. Not "healthcare-curious." The people you actually want hearing your take.

Clips, with you tagged

Every episode becomes 5–10 short clips, cross-posted with you tagged — built for LinkedIn, where this industry actually lives. Come with a take, leave with clips.

Fast, not a marathon

One topic block. 15–20 minutes of focused conversation, live, then you're done. No hour-long meander, no pre-interview homework packet.

Who we're booking

Every corner of the system gets a seat at the desk.

Health Tech & Digital Health
Payers & Insurance
Providers & Health Systems
Pharma & Biotech
Policy & Regulation
Investors & Analysts
Consumer Health & Culture

Request a spot

Takes about 90 seconds. The take matters more than the bio.

300 characters. This is the part we actually read first.
got it.

If it's a fit, we'll reach out to schedule. Either way you're on the newsletter now — that's where each week's lineup lands.

For sponsors

Your brand, inside the healthcare conversation.

HCN puts sponsors in front of the operators, founders, and executives running US healthcare — every week, all year. Not a booth. Not a banner. A presence inside the show this industry actually watches.

A letter from the hosts.

Why two founders with day jobs are starting a healthcare show.

We first met at a healthcare conference. We reconnected in 2026 at yet another healthcare conference and realized the industry conversation hadn't changed at all. Five years later you could replay the same agenda and nobody would notice. "Value-based care." "Consumerism." "Patient engagement." "Is AI good?"

It's boring and abstract. Speakers use jargon-filled word salads to present vague ideas that mean little and don't risk them losing their job… or even worse — offending somebody.

This is true for most healthcare media, not just conferences. Meaningless platitudes, or extremely dense analyses and policy review. There are 30 million of us in this industry and nowhere to go.

···

Meanwhile, healthcare itself has changed dramatically.

First, healthcare is more intertwined with pop culture than ever. People are taking research peptides, flying to Turkey for hair transplants, buying saunas, starting carnivore diets, biphasic sleeping. Industry execs will be shocked when they find out how many people get more health guidance from Andrew Huberman than from their doctor. Increasingly, the care people want isn't happening at their traditional institutions.

At the same time, health insurance premiums rose by 20% this year — it costs about $30k to cover a family now. So more people are opting for no insurance or catastrophic coverage. Which in turn means they're paying out of pocket for care and becoming a whole lot more selective about who their provider is — and demanding to know what they get out of it.

Then there's the drug pipeline — incredible, and incredibly expensive. GLP-1s are just the front edge of a peptide tsunami. Cell and gene therapies are narrowly expensive but broadly absorbed by the whole system. Some of these literally cure disease. If the trend holds, could we all live 2, 5, 10, 50 years longer? How do you treat a 130-year-old?

While we daydream about endless longevity, we are still a profoundly sick country where many people can't afford to use healthcare at all. Childhood obesity just blew past 21% (from an already alarming 17% in 2011). We have food deserts, disastrous school lunches, sedentary lifestyles, and a system so financially intimidating that avoiding it feels safer than using it.

···

It's all connected. You can't understand healthcare without understanding, at a minimum:

  • What people are actually doing for their health
  • Drugs
  • Alternative medicine
  • Clinics & hospitals
  • Insurance
  • AI & tech
  • Regulation

And healthcare can't keep having abstract conversations. You can't improve what you can't describe in practical terms.

That's why we're starting a show for the healthcare industry audience. We want to drag the conversation that already happens online and between friends into the open — practical language, real experts, breaking down the news and arguing about what comes next.

We're borrowing a proven format: rapid-fire, topic-based, guests, streamed live. A hybrid of Around the Horn and TBPN. The best nuggets die buried in 60-minute podcasts; keeping it tight gets crisp ideas and clean clips. We'll stream everywhere but lean hard into LinkedIn — that's where the established industry actually lives.

Expect that we'll evolve both our format and where to find us.

Last thing: we both run startups full-time. We agreed on day one we'd only do this if it's fun. Turns out fun is also the bet — fun is what gets people in together, loosened up and talking about what actually matters. We think that marginally improving the quality of the healthcare industry conversation can cascade into a system that's more affordable or delivers better outcomes.

Cédric & Danish
Cédric Kovacs-Johnson (Flume Health) & Danish Nagda, MD (Rezilient) · June 2026

If any of this resonates — the first show is in July.

you're on the list.

See you in July.

Your hosts

Two founders who couldn't find anything worth watching, so they made it.

Cédric Kovacs-Johnson
Cédric

Cédric Kovacs-Johnson

Founder/CEO, Flume Health

Engineer. Multi-time exited founder. Builds data infrastructure for the payers everyone else only talks about.

Danish Nagda, MD
Danish

Danish Nagda, MD

Founder/CEO, Rezilient

Physician. Hosts a daily finance show with 1M weekly impressions — past guests include Bryan Johnson, Bill Ackman, and Mark Cuban.

both still running their companies full-time. day one rule: only if it's fun.