Healthcare's financial incentives are broken — and most people have no idea. We're pulling back the curtain on who gets paid for what, why your premiums keep rising, and the forces conspiring to keep it that way.
Every year, employers and individuals pay more for healthcare — and get less in return. The reasons aren't mysterious. They're structural, financial, and deliberately obscured by the parties that benefit from the confusion.
Healthcare is a business. We break down the financial relationships between insurers, hospitals, drug companies, and middlemen — and what they mean for what you pay.
Premiums go up every year. Deductibles go up every year. We explain the underlying economic forces — and who profits from the cycle.
Diagnostics guide 70%+ of clinical decisions but represent less than 5% of healthcare spending. The result: treatments administered without the information needed to know if they'll work.
Pharmacy Benefit Managers were supposed to lower drug costs. Instead, they've become one of the most powerful — and least understood — forces driving them up. We explain how.
through insurance premiums, pharmacy benefit managers, drug pricing, diagnostic gaps, and the incentive structures that keep costs rising no matter what anyone does. No jargon. No agenda. Just honest answers to the questions you're asking.
Whether you're managing a benefits budget, navigating coverage decisions, or just trying to understand why your EOB looks the way it does — Dirty Little Secrets was made for you.
You're signing off on a healthcare spend that keeps growing with limited visibility into why. We give you the economic literacy to ask better questions — of your carriers, your PBMs, and your benefits consultants.
The people making coverage decisions deserve to understand the full picture of the financial incentives shaping the market — including the ones working against their members' interests.
You don't need to be in healthcare to want to understand it. If you've ever been surprised by a bill, denied a claim, or wondered why a drug costs what it costs — this show is for you.

Multi-cancer early detection tests are being sold on emotion, not evidence. Hannah and Lena cut through the hype to discuss what the data actually shows — and what real tools for risk assessment and data-driven cancer screening look like, and why they matter far more than the marketing suggests.

One of the most prominent voices in breast cancer research joins the show to discuss how we screen, how we treat, and the diagnostic and systemic gaps that are costing women their lives — and the system billions.

Yes, drugs are expensive. But the bigger, less-discussed problem is that most drugs don’t work for most patients — and we’re paying for them anyway. Hannah and Lena make the case for why diagnostics that identify who will and won’t respond are the missing piece of the drug pricing conversation.

Hannah and Lena introduce the show and explain why they’re doing it: to pull back the curtain on the financial misalignments built into the healthcare system that prevent patients from getting better care. If you’ve ever wondered why the system feels rigged — this is where we start.
Hannah founded Alva10 after spending two decades watching technically excellent diagnostics fail to reach patients — not because of bad science, but because of misaligned financial incentives. She has worked on the lab side, the business side, and the payer side of healthcare, giving her a full-system view of where the money flows and why. A frequent writer and speaker on healthcare economics, Hannah brings the rare ability to translate both the science behind the curtain and the financial architecture of healthcare into something anyone can understand — and get appropriately angry about.
Lena is a nationally recognized expert on precision medicine in the employer space — translating its clinical and financial implications for the benefits leaders who decide how employers invest in their workforce's health. She has spent her career designing the economic cases that move healthcare innovation from promising to covered. As the leader of the National Association of Brokers' precision medicine certification effort, Lena works daily at the intersection of what the system could be and what it currently is — and she has plenty to say about the gap between the two.