The EntreMD Podcast

The Healthcare System Is Dying: 3 Things Doctors Should Start Doing NOW

• Dr. Una • Episode 470

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Hospitals are closing, insurance companies are denying claims, private equity is taking over, and patients are suffering the consequences.

Day by day, it becomes clearer that our healthcare system is on the brink of collapse. For years, we've watched from the sidelines as it faltered. But the truth is – we are the solution. Not private equity. Not insurance companies. We are the only ones who can save this failing system before it's too late.

In this episode, I break down three actionable steps that will not only help you thrive but position you as a leader in the fight for better care.

Tune in and become part of the solution!

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Key Takeaways: 

  • 00:00 Intro 
  • 00:41 The healthcare crisis explained 
  • 04:44 The role of physicians in addressing the crisis 
  • 07:01 Building dominant brands 
  • 12:27 Supporting doctors in private practices 
  • 14:00 Becoming a part of the Profitable Private Practice Movement 
  • 19:04 A better future 
  • 20:53 Outro 

Additional Resources:


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Speaker 1:

The time to build a dominant brand has come. Will it work for your business? Yes, will it attract new clients and patients for you? Yes, would it create the door for opportunities you didn't even think of? Absolutely, and in the time that we're in, in the crisis we're in, you get to be one of the people rewriting history. You get to be one of the heroes of history because you change things with your brand.

Speaker 1:

Hi docs, welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Imna. I've been saying this for a few years now. I just want to say it a little louder Private equity is not going to change health care for us. The insurance companies are not going to turn around and change health care for us. The health care space is literally looking for saviors, is literally looking for a Calvary, and the truth of the matter is it's us. Now we have an opportunity to say yes, to answer the call and get stuff done, or we will say no and watch everything just go to blazes. Okay Now, this is a very important episode for the private practice people, but for everyone really everyone but more especially for those of us in private practice.

Speaker 1:

Now, what got me really started on this is I was looking at the doctor's profile and somebody who was an acquaintance of hers posted about how he just did his last shift at a hospital that he's been at for 15 years. You know very reputable hospital and things like that that got bought out by private equity and then private equity had signed a deal. You know, according to his post, that they were going to keep the hospital open for at least 10 years. Ok, but in the course of all of this, what happened was they acquired the hospital, they sold the land that the hospital was on, they took out a multibillion dollar loan right, because the hospital is a huge asset. They could do that and ultimately got the hospital in so much debt and then shut it down. And that's bad enough, okay, because I want you to think of a whole hospital system. He talked about the different service lines that had been created. Think about how long it takes to create that. Think about the number of people it serves, think about all of those things. And that's gone, like completely gone Now.

Speaker 1:

He then said something that made me go like, oh my goodness, like we have to figure this out. And he said that seven hospitals in the Philadelphia area have closed in the last six years. That's more than one a year, but let's just say it's one a year. And we're not talking about Pennsylvania, we're talking about Philadelphia, right, and we have a hospital a year shutting down, and there are 50 states. What does that translate to? Right, and what happens to the people who go there to get care, right, to get help, and so we're talking about a crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Speaker 1:

Okay, now, this is the deal. You know that I am a relentless supporter of physicians everywhere. You know that I have been talking about this for almost seven years, about us building profitable businesses so we have the freedom to live life and practice medicine. I want to extend this. Okay, so we can see this now, when you build your business with the model that we talk about, the model we talk about is one that allows you to build a business that is profitable so that you are able to take care of a lot of people. Right, take care of a lot of people, whether they're clients or patients you know have. Whatever your business is set up at, you're able to do that, you're able to create financial freedom for yourself, able to create time freedom for yourself from the ground up, from you picking out your business model before you even start your practice, or to start your coaching business or speaking business, whichever. We are constantly looking at these three things. That way, you end up with a business that you love.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting I was talking to a doctor who is in the Entree MD Business School scale, which is the tier for doctors, doing over a million in revenue, and I was talking about this concept and she's like you're absolutely right. When I started building my business, I you would talk about building with an exit in mind. I'm like I just got in I'm not thinking about an exit and all of those things but I did what you told me, but I was just like, well, I'm not ready to walk away from this yet, but now I'm in a season where I need to lean on my team because I'm doing more speaking, I'm out more, I want to take time off. I have stuff going on with my family and stuff like that, and I can because I built it that way. Okay, so we want that for you, we want you to have time freedom, want you to have financial freedom and all of that. We want that for you. So building a business will rock your world in the best way possible is just a beautiful experience, but this is the thing.

Speaker 1:

Beyond that, there is a reason why you are a physician in this time. You could have been a physician, you know, 70 years ago. You could have been a physician 45 years from now, but you're a physician now, and the reason you're a physician now is because you have the capacity to handle what is here and you have the capacity to be part of the team that will turn it around, and there's so many different ways we can do this, but this is kind of my call to say all hands need to be on deck, not just because of us as individuals, but because of what is going on with healthcare in the United States. So if we have all these hospitals going out of business, what happens to the people that are being cared for? It is the same thing.

Speaker 1:

There was a report this was many months ago where Walmart said, oh, 51 locations, we're going to shut them down Again. What happens to the patients who've been going there? Okay, so let's go back to Philadelphia, right? And you have seven hospitals that have closed down, have shut down, actually have been gutted, have been killed, okay, in the last six years, in the last six years. So the question then becomes where are those patients? Who's taking care of them? And if you think about it, then you know that there is unnecessary suffering, unnecessarily delay of care and unnecessary deaths that are happening. And so my question to you is do you want to be part of a group of people who will prevent unnecessarily delays, right, unnecessary suffering and unnecessary deaths?

Speaker 1:

Okay, we can no longer go like, oh, what's going on with the system and all that? Hello, it's called a doctor patient relationship. We have to take responsibility for this. We have to ask what is my part to play? And we have to start playing that part. So I talked about this earlier. The second I saw it, I went live in the EntreMD Facebook group and if you're not a part of the group, come join us in the group, okay, and I started talking about this. I said, well, there are some things that you can do. And, guys, we no longer have the luxury of rolling over and playing dead For our lives as individuals, we don't have that luxury. But, oh my goodness, for patients, and that patient could be you, it could be me, it could be my family, it could be your family. It's real people. Okay, so let me give you three things that you can do, and not even you can do, three things that are a necessity. It would have been great if you started it five years ago, but if you didn't, today's the best next day. These are not optional things. These are not cute to have. These are things that need to happen. Number one Number one is doctors.

Speaker 1:

It is time for us to build dominant brands. I've been saying this for seven years it is time for us to build dominant brands. It doesn't matter if you're employed, it doesn't matter if you're a coach, it doesn't matter if you run a private practice. It doesn't matter if it's insurance-based private practice. It doesn't matter if it's a cash-based private practice. It doesn't matter if you're a speaker. You're a consultant, it does not matter. I mean right.

Speaker 1:

What does the saying say? That bad things happen when good people keep quiet, like we have been too quiet. We know what is going wrong and we are too quiet. We're too quiet, we haven't built the brands. So when we do speak, it doesn't have a huge impact. It is time for us to build dominant brands so we can rise up to speak up against what is going on in our healthcare space, what is going on with the insurance companies, what is going on with the hospitals, what is going on with big pharma. All of these things we have to address it. We have to. But this is the thing we have to build the dominant brand. So when we do it, it has an impact. Okay, we're here to be disruptors that we make what is going on right, like the healthcare space. We're the ones that are going to right the ship. But we can't do that if we're silent.

Speaker 1:

So maybe you've said I'm an introvert, so am I. Maybe you said, oh, you know, I'm super shy, so was I. Maybe you say I'm a private person, so am I. We cannot use those excuses anymore. We cannot say, oh, you know, I'm a professional person, I don't want to be on social media, I don't want to be on YouTube or whatever. We can't do that anymore. First of all, like if we even got off this conversation the level of misinformation but why is that there? Because we are quiet. Right, we're quiet. So it is time for us to build dominant brands.

Speaker 1:

Now I want to give a really, really big shout out to Dr Rachel Rubin. She is a urologist fellowship trained in sexual medicine, and she has built a brand around menopause, around perimenopause, around the use of vaginal estrogen and preventing UTIs and all of these things, and she has been so vocal about it. Now, this is a thing that people weren't talking about. This is a thing that where women weren't getting the help that they needed, and this is a thing where people women were having recurring UTIs and having sepsis and dying. They were literally dying. Okay, now she builds a brand, she builds an Instagram following, she does the speaker circuit, she has a YouTube channel, she has an email list and she has talked about it over and over and over again.

Speaker 1:

And then she decided, well, let's make a change. And then she reaches out. She's like how do we change the guide? How do we create guidelines for this? How do we create guidelines for the general urinary syndrome of menopause? How do we do that? And it started a process. It started a process in 2021 and she kept at it and they kept at it. You know there's a whole committee. They did all the things, they wrote it and they finally, in 2025, published guidelines. And so, instead of saying, oh, nobody's taking care of the paramenopausal women and nobody said like, instead of doing that, she's like, okay, let's go make some guidelines and get this done. And what she has done since then is she has promoted it and promoted it. The last I checked her posts to talk about, it had a million eyeballs. She has a million eyeballs on this. Why does she have a million eyeballs? Because she had built the brand, because she had built the referral base, because she has built her dream 100. That's what we call it at the business school. Because she had done all these things. She's not one physician, right, there are many physicians who were involved in this, but I mean, she threw everything behind it and she was able to make a significant change. That is what a brand will do for you.

Speaker 1:

Now, when I started talking about entrepreneurship, I got dragged on social media all the time for talking about it. Right, and people are like you know, we will always have jobs, we will always have job security, and you're just, you know, like whatever they had to say, but I've been at it and at it, and through our company, through our brand, we have helped thousands of physicians. Through the entrepreneur business school. We have helped hundreds and hundreds of physicians through the profitable private practice movements. We've done that right and all of this and things are changing and the narrative is changing. That is the power of a brand.

Speaker 1:

Now I've given you an example with two brands and I could go on and on. There's so many. We've had so many clients who've built phenomenal brands. But the question I want to ask you is there are a million licensed physicians. If 10% of us leveraged our brands 10% of us imagine what would happen, because everybody has a part to play. Like I'm entrepreneurship, she is menopause and all of that stuff. You may be advocacy and government and all of those things, and like all kinds of things someone else is exposing. Like really running a narrative of what is really happening with private equity. Like there's so many things that can be done, but we need all hands on deck.

Speaker 1:

The time to build a dominant brand has come. Will it work for your business? Yes, will it attract new clients and patients for you? Yes, would it create the door for opportunities you didn't even think of? Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

And in the time that we're in, in the crisis we're in, you get to be one of the people rewriting history. You get to be one of the. That's the first thing. So the era of oh, you know I can like, learn it. You learn the crap cycle. You learn to intubate babies. You learn to deliver babies. You learn to replace knees you can do this too. You're so excited, dr Luna. Calm down, all right, number two. Number two is and this is especially for people in private practice, but for everyone else let me tell you, there has never been a time more challenging for people to run private practices.

Speaker 1:

So, whether you're in private practice or not, I want to invite you to support the doctors who are in private practice. For instance, you have private practice people in your world who don't know about the OnTermD podcast, don't know about the private practice YouTube channel that we have and all of those things. Share the resources with them. Don't ask them if they need it. They need it. Now.

Speaker 1:

If you're in private practice, I want you to understand that you have an opportunity. You have an opportunity to serve the American people and help them to stay alive, to help them to decrease suffering, to help them to decrease delays in access to care. And how are you going to do that? You are going to do that by treating your private practice like what it is. It is a healthcare system. It is a healthcare system.

Speaker 1:

It is time for you to rise as a CEO of your private practice and make it work to bring it to the point where it can serve the number of people you want it to serve. It's financially stable. It is profitable. You are leveraging your team. It can work without you. So you have the bandwidth to do even more. You have the bandwidth to disrupt. You have the bandwidth to do all of those things. So an example of what is possible so other people can see it and come into private practice, so that we can have enough empowered private practice owners, so we can go after the insurance companies.

Speaker 1:

Because, guess what, without the brand and without stable private practices, we're not going to do that because everybody's figuring out how to survive. We have to go beyond that. We have to go beyond that. So please hear me when I say this Okay, even if you're, like you know, at this time I don't want to do entre empty business school. I don't want to do all of that. We built something that every private practice owner can be a part of and we did not hold anything back.

Speaker 1:

It is a very valuable program. It is called the Profitable Private Practice Movement and I want to invite you to be a part of it. Listen, it is a place where you will learn how to fill your schedule. You'll learn how to get paid for the work you do. You'll learn how to leverage your team so your team is bearing the weight of the responsibility of generating revenue in your practice. It's a place where we'll show you how to optimize your revenue management system with your billers and all of those things, and how to turn the profits that you do generate into wealth. Guys, these five things like are there a million things to learn in private practice? Yes, if you master these five things, you will have a very profitable practice. You will so entremdcom forward slash movement. Go be a part of the movement. The investment is less than a cappuccino a day. It's $197 a month or $19.97 for a year, which is ridiculous. I still have friends till today telling me I've lost my mind for doing it.

Speaker 1:

Go, sign up and learn what you need to learn to build a healthcare system that can work, because, guess what? The American people are depending on it. They're depending on it. Hospitals are closing left, right and center. Private practices are closing left, right and center. Where do you think these people go? Where do you think they go? Okay, so build it so it works. Okay, I don't know how to do this, no problem, learn. You're the CEO of a healthcare system. Learn, okay.

Speaker 1:

The third thing we need to do is we need to grow in our capacity. Guys, it is so amazing that we spent 10 years we spent over a decade, becoming the physicians that we are. It was such a sacrifice and all of that, but we have not arrived. We have not arrived. The healthcare space is going to come knocking and it's going to say are you going to save the day? Are you going to come and save us? Are you going to come and help us? Are you going to come and save us? Are you going to come and help us? Are you going to come and roll up your sleeves? Guys, don't get me wrong. This is not about sacrificing yourself and you won't be rewarded for it. You know I talk about serving and earning, so I'm not talking about going to die or whatever. But this is the thing the healthcare space is looking for a Calvary. Will you be part of the Calvary? It may mean you need to learn to speak. You need to learn to network, you need to learn to negotiate, you need to understand how to buy practices. You need to look into advocacy at a national level. Whatever it is, you know what it is. But the thing of just saying, oh, it is what it is, we're not victims, guys, we're not victims, we're not helpless, we're not stuck. In fact, we're so not stuck that we're the answer. So we got to grow in capacity. We have to get out of this fixed mindset and into a growth mindset. We have to get out of this.

Speaker 1:

I've arrived to asking the question what is the skill required for me to make my next jump, my next leap, for me to help at a different level? What is the next jump required? And you know, big shout out to the doctors in the business school, because this is what they do all day, every day. What skill do I need to stack on? What do I need to stack on? What do I need to learn? How do I need to change? Who do I need to connect to? So the whole thing of I can't do this because I don't know that. No, if you don't know it, figure it out. We have to come into this space where we're like my job is to grow, my job is to grow. My job is to get better. My job is to expand capacity. So if I haven't done it before, well, guess what I'm going to learn and I'm going to put in the reps and I'm going to do it till I become great at it and then I'll go to the next thing.

Speaker 1:

The healthcare space is going to come knocking. It's going to come knocking Like will you help? No-transcript Will you be the one who is an example of what is possible, so other doctors can see that the healthcare space is looking for saviors, is looking for recovery? I know it may sound a little bizarre to you. Like, oh, like. What is she talking about? But please hear me, please. I've been talking about this stuff since 2016. I've been talking for almost a decade. It is not going to get better. Private equity is not going to stop. They're not going to stop. We will stop them. The insurance company is not going to turn around and say, oh, you know, we don't think we've been doing right by you, we're going to. No, they're not. They're going to need to be stopped. Okay, when everybody deserts the patients, we don't. Now, the way we don't desert them is by building practices that work, so we can stay in business and take care of them.

Speaker 1:

So what do I want you to do? If you're a private practice owner, I want you to join the profitable private practice movement. There's no reason not to. The ROI is very clear. The time commitment is very little. The investment is insanely little. Okay, entremdicom, forward slash movement. If you're not a private practice owner, I want you to reach out to other private practice owner. I want you to encourage them. I want you to thank them for their service. I want you to thank them for their service. I want you to give them a link, say hey, come watch this video, listen to this podcast or join the movement or whatever, growing your capacity, build your brand. The healthcare space needs your brand and it needs your voice. Do that. But this is the deal.

Speaker 1:

A decade from now, we can look back in utter shock and disbelief at the ridiculousness of the healthcare system in 2025. It could be so different that we'll look back in disbelief Like how did we ever tolerate that? How did we ever let that happen? How in the world were we convinced that we were victims? That could be us, but if we continue the way we are continuing, it will not be. We'll still be victims. We'll still be complaining. We'll still say, oh, you remember when? No, we can right the ship. Well, we will only right the ship if we rise up.

Speaker 1:

So invitation to you to rise up and when you're done, when you make that decision, I want you to take this episode. This is not a cute oh, dr Una has to record today, so she's recording today kind of episode. No, this is not that. This is a call. This is an invitation to be part of a movement. This is an invitation to be part of the Calvary. That's what this is.

Speaker 1:

And so I want you to take this and I want you to share it with every doctor you know. I want to share it in every group you're a part of. That allows you to share. I want you to go like hey, guys, let's do this. Let's build dominant brands. If we're in private practice, let's build those healthcare systems and show up like the CEOs that we are. Learn what we need to learn, join the movement and let us all grow in our capacity. All of us, all of us. No more victim. All of us, all of us, no more victim. I don't know. I didn't get a business education. Nobody told me. It's not fair. Like none of that none. We grow in our capacity to be who the healthcare space needs right now. Okay, rooting for every single one of you.

Speaker 1:

Entreemd, we are a thousand percent committed to helping doctors get this done, okay. And so, whether you listen to the EntreeMD podcast or you follow the private practice channel that we started, or you read our books, or you come into the movement, or you come into the EntreeMD business school, or you come to our events, whichever, we have a gazillion ways of supporting you. You can send us a DM, or send us an email, druna D-R-U-N-A at EntreeMDcom, and say this is the kind of support I'm looking for, and we will support you. We are here for this and this is the time. Okay. So I'm rooting for you. You're not alone. You have support. You have a community you can lean on. Let's do this. The healthcare space is looking for you, for you. So say yes and I'll see you on the next episode.