The Ship Has Sailed: Mike Munger on Medicare, Markets, and Debt

The Ship Has Sailed: Mike Munger on Medicare, Markets, and Debt

Author: The Doctor's Lounge August 28, 2026 Duration: 57:08
Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Duke political economist and podcast host Mike Munger (The Answer is Transaction Costs) joins Anthony DiGiorgio and Anish Koka to argue that what Americans call "health insurance" isn't insurance at all — it's a social program where, as Bastiat put it, everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. Munger walks through why Medicare functions as a bilateral monopoly rather than a market, compares the U.S. system to Germany's competitive-insurer model a...

In The Doctor's Lounge, the white coat comes off for a conversation that moves freely from the exam room to the boardroom. This isn't a lecture hall; it's the back table where practicing physicians gather to unpack the complex systems that define modern medicine. Hosted by Dutch Rojas and Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, with regular voices like Anish Koka, MD, Dan Choi, MD, and Sanat Dixit, MD, the discussions are built on frontline experience. You'll hear unfiltered perspectives on the policy debates that shape care, the realities of navigating business and entrepreneurship within a medical practice, and the constant push for meaningful reform. The dialogue is grounded in a shared commitment to physician autonomy and, ultimately, better patient outcomes. Each episode in this podcast connects the dots between clinical fitness and the health of the medical profession itself, offering a rare look at the challenges and opportunities that exist where patient care meets the mechanics of the healthcare industry. It's a space for the nuanced, often contentious, and always real conversations happening behind the scenes.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

The Doctors’ Lounge
Podcast Episodes
The FDA, Unicure, and the Limits of Accelerated Approval [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:08
Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Anish sits down with Adu, a med student and biotech investor, to work through the FDA's contested handling of Unicure's AMT-130 — a gene therapy for Huntington's disease delivered via ste…
Free Markets, Private Equity, and the Moral Case for Medicine [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:26:47
Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Jared Rhoads, founder of the Center for Modern Health and senior lecturer in health policy at the Dartmouth Institute, joins Drs. Koka and DiGiorgio for a wide-ranging conversation on the…
From Babylon to Baylor: How Insurance Went Off the Rails [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:01
Send us Fan Mail Anish and Dr. DiGiorgio trace the history of insurance from ancient Babylonian bottomery contracts through Egyptian workers' guilds, Greek risk-pooling societies, Lloyd's of London, and the birth of actu…