Doctors are paid flat salaries. No bonuses for more procedures, scans, tests or visits. They’re paid to heal. American health care’s original sin is fee-for-service: We pay most doctors for volume, so we get volume. Mayo removed the incentive to overtreat, and the entire culture reorganized around the question that should drive all medicine: What does this patient actually need?
Doctors work as teams, not individual know-it-alls. Mayo practices multidisciplinary medicine. So gastroenterologists, liver specialists and surgeons all work together to evaluate complex cases like Autumn’s. The doctors do this in days, under one roof, with constant communication. Compare that to the standard American experience: months of siloed referrals, repeated tests and specialists who, maddeningly, never speak to each other.
Patient-first culture. This was the most striking thing to us: Every person from surgeons to desk clerks seemed caring and kind. They were obsessed with understanding Autumn and smartly diagnosing her before recommending any actions. As someone who started and has run two companies, I can tell you: Cultures are controllable and scalable. We should demand this of every medical institution in America.
Mayo’s scarcest asset — coordinated diagnostic brilliance based on real data, cases, lab results and patients — is exactly what AI is getting good at. Mayo knows it, running more than 12,000 clinical studies and building its Mayo Clinic Platform to digitize its expertise.
Think about what Mayo data changes: A community hospital in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, will never recruit 4,000 Mayo-caliber specialists. It doesn’t need to. It could tap into Mayo’s expertise and data to instantly help tens of millions of patients.
Unfortunately those with Medicare Advantage will be unable to avail themselves of Mayo Clinic.
Starting January 1, 2026, Mayo Clinic will no longer participate in most Medicare Advantage networks with United Healthcare and Humana. This is a major shift that will affect access to care for millions of Americans — especially those who depend on Mayo Clinic for specialized or ongoing treatment. Approximately 1.6 million Medicare Advantage members in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa will be affected, including over 780,000 enrollees in plans directly tied to these two insurers.
So, why is this happening? Like many hospitals, Mayo Clinic has faced rising costs and lower reimbursements from private insurance companies. Humana has argued that Mayo’s care costs are too high, while Mayo has stated that the reimbursement terms offered by Medicare Advantage plans simply don’t align with the quality of care and time they dedicate to each patient. In short, the relationship between major hospitals and insurance companies is strained — and Mayo isn’t the only one rethinking its network participation.
Other healthcare medical centers also eschew Medicare Advantage.
I’m certainly turning to “Dr. Google” more frequently to manage my own health care.
In April 2025 when I arrived in my Zoom Care physician associate’s office with a swollen leg and a blue foot, she had some kind of medical app on her laptop that came up with “intermittent claudification”. A diagnosis that eluded the top doctors I saw at Houston Methodist Hospital 25 years ago with the initial complaint, and all the doctors I saw in the intervening 25 years.
As a professional researcher with a college degree in Biology (and Chemistry) I have been doing my own health research for decades.
The National Library of Medicine Online is free. Best of all, it contains research from countries with national health care (the UK, Sweden, Japan, etc.) so the databases are national and n = huge instead of the small data collected in the U.S. by separated research groups. These are journal articles so they are technical.
This was how I learned that MRI was the gold standard for sensitivity and specificity for breast cancer in dense breasts. I paid for my own MRI out of pocket in 2013 when a mammogram discovered four pinhead-size white dots in a row (microcalcifications) but did not find the bilateral tumors which were only 5 mm and hidden in the white nets of dense tissue. They were Invasive Ductal Carcinoma on both sides. Stage 1. I had bilateral mastectomy, no chemo or radiation and no recurrence since. I had the rare combination of access to information, knowledge to interpret it for my own benefit, money to pay for MRI out of pocket and determination to demand the MRI.
AI is a tool. It can help with the search. It can digest the technical data and present it in a way that the average person can understand and use. I use it every day. I keep up with research.
I firmly guide my own health decisions. I tell doctors, “You have a thousand patients but I only have one ME. I don’t claim to know everything about medicine but I have the time to drill down through the research on the one issue that concerns me.”
That was how I learned that Vitamin B-3 (niacin) supplementation can help people with early Parkinson’s Disease (like me). Published in 2025, my doctor had never heard of it. I started taking 100 mg per day of niacin and immediately felt better.
Use every tool available, including AI, realizing that YOU ALONE will suffer if the research isn’t thorough. And doctors barely have the time and attention to listen to you, much less research your problems.