"Children are the most vulnerable population in the country, because they don't have a vote. They don't have their own money. They don't have their income. They are not employed. So how do they get healthcare?"
Dr. Vipul Mankad has spent a career in the rooms where that question gets answered. In Part 1 of this two-part conversation with host Sas Mukherjee, he traces the path from a small town in India, where his father was the family practitioner who removed cataracts, delivered babies and managed an epidemic, to Cook County Hospital, NYU, Cornell, and a research career in sickle cell disease.
Then the pivot. Invited to chair a pediatrics department in Kentucky, he decided that working molecule by molecule was too small, co-founded a children's hospital, and watched managed care arrive from the West Coast. When the university realized insurers could cut it out of the network entirely, it started its own health plan. Dr. Mankad became its medical director, and got his first real look at the payer side of the equation.
Twelve years later he reinvented himself again, taking an unpaid role with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions so he could learn how health law is actually written. He was there as Kennedy and Hatch built CHIP, and as value-based purchasing, quality divided by cost, became the concept later folded into accountable care.
Part 2 covers what worries him now: Medicaid funding pressure and access, genomics-enabled personalized medicine, and remote home monitoring.
GUEST
Dr. Vipul Mankad, academic physician, pediatric hematology and oncology. Co-founder of a children's hospital in Kentucky. Board member, Catalyst Solutions.
HOST
Sas Mukherjee, President and CEO, Catalyst Solutions.
ABOUT
Catalyst Conversations brings payer executives, clinicians and policy voices into plain-spoken conversations about the systems behind American healthcare.