Physician anesthesiologist | Cofounder & Executive Director, Opioid Free America | 33 yrs in healthcare—zero tolerance for the status quo.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Joined November 2008
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Matt McCord retweeted
This is tremendous news for America's children. An entire generation will grow up as SpaceX owners. Well done @elonmusk! 🇺🇸
Matt McCord retweeted
These 2 images define the problem in health care despite the noise
Physicians do more work and more administrative work for significantly less compensation.
Hospitals charge more and more for the services they provide
But these yahoos including ‘physician leaders’ keep telling you physicians are the problems
Matt McCord retweeted
My friend Jimmy nails it here. There’s a deep psychological pain that comes with getting pay cuts over your career. We get better over time as docs and get paid less while patients pay more to the intermediaries/value extractors.
Doctors haven't gotten a raise from Medicare since 1992. They've gotten a 55% pay cut. 📉
In 1992 Medicare paid $31.00 per unit of physician work. In 2026 it pays $33.40. If it had just kept up with inflation, it would be about $74.
Same work. Less than half the buying power.
Meanwhile your mortgage, your student loans, and your kids' tuition kept up with inflation just fine.
You can't control what Medicare pays you. You can control what you do with what's left.
What's your specialty? 👇
Hit follow to learn the personal finance topics you wish you learned in med school.
Sources: Medicare Physician Fee Schedule conversion factor history (AMA/CMS); 2026 = non-APM conversion factor. Inflation adjustment uses BLS CPI-U (1992 annual average → Aug 2026).
#physicianfinance #moneymeetsmedicine #medicare #doctorpay #physicianburnout
Matt McCord retweeted
Most doctors prefer evidence based medicine.
If you scratch beneath the surface you begin to realize the 'evidence' most rely on is not always trustworthy.
I can 100% believe what I see with my own eyes.
That too, is evidence.
During her talk at Rutgers, @TracyBethHoeg highlighted a scandal that has received no media attention. The FDA approved Avacopan (Tavneos) based on manipulated clinical trial data. The drug has been linked to 8 deaths. Just 18 days after Høeg moved to withdraw its approval, she was fired and the drug remains on the market.
Matt McCord retweeted
In 100% agreement
Exercise should be a prescribed
New @JACCJournals @ACCinTouch scientific statement
jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.…
Matt McCord retweeted
who knew that United Healthcare owned a big internet media company. What could go wrong ?
sunlightreportinsurance.com/…
So true. Big Pharma now owns both media and Medicine. Let’s begin the break up by eliminating tv ads like everywhere else in the world (except New Zealand). @RobertKennedyJr is right on this.
The Lancet was an outstanding medical journal; I was a subscriber from medical through residency and fellowship. It was printed on thin, non-gloss paper, had no or minimal ads, was beautifully written, and had timely, clinically relevant content. I read it religiously. Peer review was a one week process! At some point, they went to the dark side with Pharma, and the Left.
The New England Journal of Medicine followed a similar trajectory.
The decline of these formerly excellent institutions parallels the decline of the medical profession. The common denominator is corruption.
Matt McCord retweeted
NEW: We've just released an updated Sunlight Report on UnitedHealth Group.
Our research now identifies 2,807 entities across UnitedHealth's sprawling corporate empire, including 376 additional entities since our original report in 2025.
Here's what the Center for Health & Democracy (@cforhd) found.
NEW: We’ve released the latest edition of our Sunlight Report on UnitedHealth Group!
Our updated research reveals 2,807 entities across UnitedHealth’s sprawling corporate empire, including 376 additional entities identified since our original report in 2025.
From its insurance empire and physician practices to pharmacies and surgery centers, UnitedHealth’s reach into American health care is enormous.
For more, check out the full Sunlight Report on UnitedHealth Group: sunlightreportinsurance.com/
Matt McCord retweeted
Twelve hours before my son Mitch was killed, he called me.
It was the best conversation we'd had in over a year. He told me he wanted to come home, live with us again, and go back to college. Then he told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him too.
Twelve hours later, he was gone.
For a long time, that phone call felt like the cruelest part. It seemed like God let me believe everything was going to be OK, and then took my son the same day.
There's a name for what happened in my brain. It's called cognitive tunneling. After all these years, I recently learned the name of it from a post by Jim Kwik @jimkwik , author of the book Limitless.
Under trauma, your attention narrows to one terrible point, and you lose the rest of the picture. I've described it as a camera zooming in so far that it can only see a small part of the world. I've felt it and written about it, but now I have a name for it, and that's healing.
A while after Mitch died, a chaplain friend sat with me in the hospital chapel and told me to do the hard work of looking back at that day from a different angle. So I did.
On the very last day of Mitch's life, we were connected. He was looking forward to coming home. And that same day, he went to his eternal home.
That phone call was a gift God gave me to hold onto.
The third commandment of self-brain surgery is that I must believe that most of my automatic thoughts are untrue. Grief hands you a story fast. You're allowed to look at it again.
"The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit." Psalm 34:18, ESV.
If you're in that tunnel right now, I'm so sorry. Look again. It's hard and holy work, and you don't have to do it alone.
Save this for the next time hardship has you too zoomed in to see other things that are still true. Share with a friend who's in the tunnel.
And follow me to connect the dots between neuroscience and faith to help you navigate life and find flourishing.
Click the link in my bio to learn more about the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery.
#selfbrainsurgery #anxiety #mentalhealth #grief #neuroscience
Brilliant. “Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government.”
Matt McCord retweeted
@UHC net profits attributed to shareholders for the Q1-Q3 of ‘26 were $15.87B.
Let’s not let anyone claim legitimately that physicians and hospitals are a main cause of the affordability issues in US healthcare.
UnitedHealth reports $4.1B in profit, launches AI recommendations for Medicare Advantage plans beckerspayer.com/financial/u…
Matt McCord retweeted
Call your doctor's office during business hours, and there's a 1 in 6 chance no one picks up.
Healthcare employs more people than any other industry, yet staff are buried in paperwork and patients struggle to find care.
A big part of why we @a16z backed Prosper AI.
I spend my day speaking with leaders of healthcare practices.
2027 is going to be a very tough year.
CMS reimbursements are down 9% in specialties like Dermatology, and 84% of healthcare practices report an increase in their operational cost.
Healthcare practices are feeling an incredible squeeze, and many will go out of business.
But leaders have more control than they think.
People think about AI primarily as a way of cutting costs. But AI is the opportunity for them to take over control and fight the growing pressure on their ability to provide quality care.
We quantified exactly how much control practice leaders can count on by introducing AI into their practices in four ways.
Today, at Prosper we’re publishing the 2026 Prosper AI Growth Report, showing how AI can drive up practice revenue by $125K/year (11% increase) per physician.
You can read more about our report in the link below.
Matt McCord retweeted
Your doctor cuts you off about 11 seconds after you start talking. Researchers literally timed it in a 2018 study. That number is why Google's new Lancet result is bigger than it looks.
In the study, 98 real urgent care patients texted with Google's AI days before their appointment. No scans, no exam, no bloodwork, just an unhurried conversation about what was wrong. That alone put the correct final diagnosis on the AI's list 90% of the time.
Sounds like magic until you learn what medicine has known for 50 years.
Back in 1975, a British team published a study in the BMJ tracking which part of a visit actually produced the right diagnosis. The physical exam? The labs? Nope. In 82% of cases, the patient's story alone got the doctor there. Everything else mostly confirmed what listening had already found.
So the playbook for accurate diagnosis has existed since 1975. Let the patient talk. Medicine just built a system where nobody has time to run it, and an 18-minute appointment with 11 seconds of uninterrupted patient talk was the result.
Google didn't build a superhuman doctor. It built the first clinician in 50 years with enough time to use the method we already proved works.
And my favorite detail buried in the study... physicians who read the AI's pre-visit summary said it changed how they treated the patient in over half of cases. Hand a doctor the full story before you walk in the room and you get different medicine.
Turns out the most advanced medical instrument Google ever shipped is a conversation that doesn't get interrupted.
Today @TheLancet published our AMIE study with @BIDMC_Medicine, the first prospective study of patient-facing conversational diagnostics in a real clinic.
AMIE is a research system people can chat with before doctors appointments. Testing AMIE outside the lab with real urgent care patients showed how technology can help gather medical histories safely. Clinicians reported that the summaries helped them prepare for visits in 75% of cases and influenced their approach to care in more than half. AMIE’s differential diagnoses also matched the doctors’ final diagnoses 90% of the time giving clinicians more time to focus on patient care.
It’s Google’s first-ever paper in The Lancet’s main journal!
Matt McCord retweeted
This is @Annemarieward, a recovery advocate from Scotland. Annmarie says our systems of care are run by people who fundamentally do not understand the nature of addiction. Drug policy is filled with activists and bureaucrats instead of people with lived experience. She's right.
Matt McCord retweeted
This is absolutely the right approach by Winchester College. At school and university, access to all devices needs to be rationed if young people are to learn to read, think, calculate and write. Traditional cognitive skills are more not less important in the age of AI. thetimes.com/uk/education/ar…
Matt McCord retweeted
Amazing, isn’t it?!
New study in @JAMAHealthForum: Profitability of Nonprofit and For-Profit Ambulatory Surgery Centers
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
h/t Elizabeth Plummer & Kahler Doyle
@JHUCarey @JohnsHopkinsSPH @NeeleySchoolTCU
A tragedy.
I want you to see what America is really taking.
This is not a random sample. This is the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. The most comprehensive prescription dataset in the United States. Published by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
256 million antidepressant prescriptions filled in a single year. 206 million for statins. 83 million for metformin. 71 million for GLP-1s. 69 million for opioid painkillers.
About 1 in 12 of every prescription filled in America is an antidepressant.
We are the most medicated country on Earth. And it is not close.
