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The Moment explores the pivotal moments that changed the lives and careers of the world’s leading CEOs and defined their leadership journeys.
Claire Blake (00:04):
From World 50, this is The Moment where we explore the pivotal moments that changed the lives and careers of the world's leading CEOs and defined their leadership journeys. Today we're talking to Mark Bertolini, CEO of Oscar Health, board chairman at Verizon and former CEO of Aetna.
Mark Bertolini (00:23):
We always, when we confront a gift like this, because you learn that you can't go back, you'll never be who you were before, and so you have to decide who and what you'll be, and that's daunting in one regard. But the other side of it is you have an opportunity to reinvent who you are and your place in the world. This is a moment where you don't have to be what you were before.
Claire Blake (00:48):
Mark's long journey in the healthcare industry has been both professional and personal, highlighted by his son's intense battle with cancer in the early 2000s. In a story spanning a fateful day on a snowy mountain, a desperate plea in an empty chapel, and an investor meeting gone wrong. It's the kind of tale that feels straight out of a Martin Scorsese film. Mark's journey of personal and professional redemption is a reflection of the tragedies, trade-offs and triumphs that have shaped him. But as he explains it, life or death moments provide a reminder that life isn't easily separated into work and home. And the leaders who stand to benefit the most are the ones who embrace the mystery of it all.
(01:27):
It is awesome to connect with you today, Mark. You're a very proud father of a German shepherd named Keeva, who we've had the pleasure to meet before. How would Keeva describe Mark Bertolini?
Mark Bertolini (01:37):
Ooh, I don't know. I mean, dogs are, we can't, as humans describe how dogs feel because they have unconditional love and no matter what you do, they still love you regardless. And so the one thing I do know about Keeva is that her whole life is with me and only part of my life will be with her.
Claire Blake (01:58):
That's so profound. I mean, this is a taste of what we're going to dive into and the way that you think and the way you respond. You grew up in Detroit, oldest of six kids. You always had a little bit of a rebellious streak from what I know. What kind of student were you?
Mark Bertolini (02:11):
I was a lousy student until my parents realized that I couldn't see, and I got glasses at the age of seven in second grade, and I said, oh my God, the letters are actually straight on the blackboard and trees have leaves.
Claire Blake (02:24):
That's hilarious.
Mark Bertolini (02:25):
So I struggled with reading and watching the blackboard, and the crazy thing is I have a photographic memory, and so I couldn't see enough to even use it, so I didn't realize it until later in life.
Claire Blake (02:37):
I'm going to fast forward a bit because you completed your degree at Wayne State did drop out twice before finishing, earned your MBA from Cornell. You got into the healthcare industry, worked at New York Life. I'm fast forwarding quite a bit, but now time is 2001. You're hitting your stride as a senior executive at Cigna, running all lines of business on the commercial side, and something pretty major happens to your son, Eric. Walk me through what happened.
Mark Bertolini (03:04):
We were in Vermont skiing and his abdomen started to swell and he had a terrible stomach ache and we thought it was just something adolescents go through and told him to buck up and toughen up. The family, we had my mother-in-law and Lauren, my daughter, and my wife Susan. And so we had them hang out in the car while we had Thanksgiving dinner. But when we went home the next day, we knew something wasn't right and we had an idea that something was wrong. About a week and a half, two weeks earlier when I was in the gym, we had a gym in the house and he came in and he had these spots under his arms and I said, I wonder if your mom changed the detergent. And when I looked, they were petechiae, which is bleeding through the skin, and I said, we got to get you to a doctor. So the Thanksgiving weekend was sort of the culmination of something profound happening. We went and got an Harrison's internal medicine text, looked up idiopathic splenomegaly, which is a large spleen without any real cause and found that the last and most remote opportunity for it to be something severe was a thing called T-Cell Gamma delta Lymphoma, which we said, well, I mean there've only been 30 some people that have ever been diagnosed with it, so it can't be that. And sure enough, it was that.
Claire Blake (04:24):
34 people and he was the youngest. Right?
Mark Bertolini (04:27):
He was the youngest, 16, and it happened to men between 17 and 34, and everybody was dead. Nobody made it.
Claire Blake (04:35):
Wow. But you get a pretty drastic diagnosis. What happens with you then with work?
Mark Bertolini (04:40):
Well, I tried to balance it and it just didn't work at some point. Until we knew what we were going to do, we sort of played along and she said, this is incurable. Everybody dies. You can get him into remission with chemotherapy, but then it comes back so fast that they're usually gone in six months. She goes, I've never seen one of these cases before, but I've always had this idea if we could kill the T cells, which are the cells that were cancerous, we could solve this. And the only way to kill the T cells is to do a bad bone marrow transplant. So if we could kill the T cells and then address the graft-versus-host disease, maybe he could live. And I said to him, here's the game plan. What do you think? He said, well, dead in six months, or we can try this thing. He goes, I'll do it if you do it with me. I said, okay.
Claire Blake (05:40):
You quit your job because Eric says, I need you to do this with me. As a very senior executive at Cigna, devote all of your energy into helping him fight this rare cancer with a crazy wild treatment that nobody probably had ever heard of, tried before, wound up having some horrible complications. What happened next?
Mark Bertolini (06:03):
We got him into Boston and then we started the whole bone marrow transplant and that began that journey. And my brother Peter the third in the family, was the perfect mismatch. We did his total body irradiation holy week. So his fifth day of total body irradiation was on Good Friday. And so then at that point, he is clinically can't continue as a human until he gets the bone marrow transplant. He would die otherwise. Cause he had no bone marrow left. And so my brother Peter came in on that Friday, gave his donation, and on Saturday before Easter, the day before Easter, he got the bone marrow transplant and the next day his bone marrow transplant came in and by the end of that following week, the transplant worked. But then his graft-versus-host, we were packing up literally to go home and his graft-versus-host disease started. So everything from his esophagus all the way down to his intestines started to get what they call gastric dysplasia. And we tried to feed him, but he was allergic to soy and all the intralipids in the United States were soy-based.
(07:15):
And so he went through this very slow process of starving, went from 140 pounds down to 80 pounds, lost all his hair, and it was at that point where we started to worry that maybe this wasn't going to work.
Claire Blake (07:28):
Wow. So you were worried it wasn't going to work and eventually had to move him to hospice, which we'll talk a little bit about.
(07:37):
This podcast is all about the moments that fundamentally change who we are as people and as leaders. It's not lost on me I'm having this conversation with you about a very intimate moment in your family that really changed you as an individual. I've heard you say before that during your son's cancer treatment, you hit a breaking point. Can you tell us a little bit about that moment? What happened?
Mark Bertolini (08:03):
Well, I mean, I had been trained in the Jesuit style where you don't make deals with God, you actually be of good mind and prepared. So as part of that, we had the Harrison's Internal Medicine text. We had the Pub laptop with PubMed on it, and we met with the medical team every morning for an hour and took him through the manager process, what's important today? What do we look for? Where can I find it in the book? It was just like focus, focus, focus. Be prepared, be prepared, be prepared. And as he got sicker and sicker, I started getting doctors saying to me, let's do not resuscitate. And my answer is no, don't ask me again. But we were running out of time. He was starving to death. The cancer was pretty much gone. He was starving to death from the graft-versus-host disease. He couldn't eat.
Claire Blake (08:53):
The disease that you injected in him in order to fix the cancer, which is just wild. Yeah.
Mark Bertolini (08:58):
Right.
Claire Blake (08:58):
Yeah.
Mark Bertolini (08:59):
So the cure was killing him. And so that morning, 8:30 AM they called us in the consult room, told us it's not going to work. We can't keep this up and we need to put him in hospice. So I went into the room, we did a rosary together, and his sister sat with him and talked about what his plans were, what he wanted for his funeral and stuff.
(09:22):
Then I went down to the chapel. I took the cross from around my neck, my scapula from around my neck, the rosary out of my pocket, and I put it on the altar and I said, me for him. Let me have his disease. Let me have his pain. Let him live a life. I've lived a wonderful life. I don't need to do this anymore.
Claire Blake (09:43):
It does in some way feel like one of those life altering moments. Maybe it's the Hollywood movie in me, but did it feel like that at the time?
Mark Bertolini (09:53):
It felt more like a surrender to me.
Claire Blake (09:57):
So tell me how things ended up with Eric.
Mark Bertolini (09:59):
I went to meet with the medical team and I didn't have the book and I didn't have the computer. And they said, where's your book and computer? I said, it doesn't matter anymore. This doesn't work. And my son is dying. He's dying of starvation and we need an intralipid that has something other than soy in it. And Tara was his resident and Tara said, you know what? I'll call my professor at Johns Hopkins and see if he knows where there's something like that. Tara comes back and says, yeah, my professor says there's a non soy-based intralipid using fish, omega three fatty acids, and it's in Austria and it's called Omegaven, but it's not approved by the FDA. And so six days later we're giving him the Omegaven And this was in late July, early August. And in October he was in step-down therapy and going in and out of the hospital, hair grown back, putting on weight.
Claire Blake (10:58):
Did you tell anybody about the deal that you made in the chapel?
Mark Bertolini (11:01):
No. While I was in the hospital with Eric earlier that year, the news broke about the Boston Diocese and all the things going on with children and priests, and I was so profoundly disgusted by it. And I wrote a note to the archbishop in Hartford who had been the bishop in Falls River that was receiving these men and placing them elsewhere. And I sent him a note and I said, I know that we must in our hearts find forgiveness for men who are evil and sick, but I wonder why the Catholic church wouldn't recognize their obligation to protect our children and keep them out of harm's way. So I had sort of at that moment decided that maybe the Catholic, I got a letter back that said, none of your business in essence. And I said, okay, I'm done with this church. It was sort of giving all this stuff and putting it on the altar later and it was saying, I'm done here.
Claire Blake (12:09):
Yeah.
Mark Bertolini (12:10):
Maybe all this stuff I've learned all my life is bullshit.
Claire Blake (12:12):
Yeah. Instead of the institution of religion at that moment, it was very personal. So Eric comes home in February, 2003. Tell me what happened exactly a year from that day.
Mark Bertolini (12:24):
I had a friend who was praying for Eric at the wailing wall in Jerusalem. He was a shaman of sorts, and he called me after I had my accident. Cause Eric came home on February 18th, 2003. And on February 18th, 2004, at about the same time, I hit a tree and broke my neck in five places. And I was, as soon as I woke up out of my coma, they had an EEG machine on me. They'd given me last rights. I was pretty screwed up. And because I was laying in cold water, it prevented my spinal cord from rupturing, but they didn't know if I'm going to be able to walk again, all that sort of stuff. So I wake up, the nurses give me a sponge bath, he goes running from the room going, oh my God, he's alive. And he didn't mean that. He meant he's awake, but he was so shocked that I woke up cause I said, what are you doing? And he went running and I'll never, Maroon 5's A Hundred Years was playing up on the MTV and the doctors came and asked, I suppose you have a lot of questions. I said, well, I know I've had a skiing accident. That's the last thing I remembered I was doing. And they said, well, what do you need to know? I said, how do I get out of here because you people will kill me if you keep me.
(13:35):
Because of the whole of Eric's experience and how people, I mean they tried to take Eric away from me at one point because they thought I was being unreasonable. And so I go home. And so my buddy calls, he goes, how's Eric doing? Oh, he is doing great. He is back at school. He was getting some tutoring. He had had a stroke through the process because of the medication we put him on, but he was doing well. And he said, how about you? I say, I broke my neck. He goes, you made a deal, didn't you?
Claire Blake (14:01):
Oh my gosh. That gives me chills. So I do want to ask, I mean, you described this moment and your deal as kind of a little bit of a burning bush experience. You said it felt like a surrender. Now looking back this many years later, does it feel like that was truly a breakdown or does that feel like that was a breakthrough?
Mark Bertolini (14:20):
I don't know how to describe it other than all of that just changed my attitude about what was important in life. I often tell people this is not a bad day. It's a hard day, but this is not a bad day. And in large part, we're not going to die from this. We will survive. Things will be fine. We still have our families.
Claire Blake (14:43):
I'm thinking about the fact that most people don't have one story to tell, let alone two, we could probably spend hours unpacking both the scenarios of being told over and over, your son is dead, basically dying. We need his life to your own experience, debilitating experience dealing with pain for decades afterwards. So it's pretty profound that we have two that we could explore with you. How did facing your own mortality change the way that you saw life, that you saw leadership, that you saw the role of business? Obviously you've had time to process this to the nth degree. So tell me a little bit about how that's played out.
Mark Bertolini (15:23):
I guess the thing I would say is that we always, when we confront a gift like this, and they are gifts in their own strange ways because you learn that you can't go back, you'll never be who you were before. And so you have to decide who and what you'll be. And that's daunting in one regard. Will I be as capable? Will I be as sharp? Will I be as loving and all those sorts of things? But the other side of it is, you have an opportunity to reinvent who you are and your place in the world. This is a moment where you don't have to be what you were before. And so it's a moment where you draw on the strengths of all of your attributes versus the ones you thought were the most important. And you find out they weren't all that important anyway,
Claire Blake (16:18):
You have this different outlook on life. You had a pretty demanding career before this all happened. Why go back to work? What was it about I still have a job to do.
Mark Bertolini (16:29):
I realized how screwed up the healthcare system was, and I had insights into what I thought might make it better. And the doctors who treated Eric while they were honorable and good people didn't get him up. They didn't see that little kid struggle and become a great lacrosse player and a great football player and a really smart kid. They saw a cancer that was incurable. They didn't see Eric, and I did. And when I woke up, I was the spinal cord injury in the Neuro ICU, and they were worried about that. They weren't worried about who I was.
(17:17):
And months after, four or five months after that, we had the Aetna investor meeting. I walked down the aisle to give a presentation with a neck brace on and a cane as pale white as any human could be, and still be walking and gave a presentation. And people were just like, oh my God, why are you here? You have to get back to something that brings you hope. And so I would argue that the hope of being something and being valuable again, keeps you going versus sitting and staring into the dark and killing yourself, which I thought about a couple of times and got close both times.
Claire Blake (17:58):
And even in the years we've known you, Mark, which is pretty wild. I know that it, it's been a crazy long, dark experience for you. Now, I'm thankful that we're getting to see a little bit of a different version on the other side of what you've gone through. It became super personal for you. You did join Oscar Health in '23. This was a health insurance startup that's now an $11 billion public company seeking to revolutionize healthcare. How does your personal experience, not only with what you experienced in healthcare, but what you've also tapped into in the spiritual realm in the spirituality and making that bet, how does that play out as a leader for you today?
Mark Bertolini (18:40):
I believe that leaders have, the best leaders have two very important characteristics that most people don't see, but they only experience. Curiosity. The willingness to always learn in every interaction they have with everybody. So when I first came here to Oscar, I spent the first 10 weeks meeting with all the teams and this company was broken in ways that I'd broke companies before multiple times. So I knew what the answers were, but I needed to be curious about why we were where we were and who were the people working and what were their motives and what did I need to do to move them from where they were to where they could be great. Because I've learned it's like I don't need any more money to put on the pile. What I need is I need to show that what I've been able to accomplish and the ideas I have are impartible to other people who will make them better in the future and maybe will solve the problem one day. And then the second characteristic is the courage. Once you know, do you have the courage to do the hard things that are necessary to affect that learning? And if you have that curiosity and courage, I don't care who you are, you're going to make it. And so that's what I look for in people now. Are you curious? And then I've spent time talking to people in interviews about, well, what do you think about this stuff? And how do you look at it?
Claire Blake (20:00):
I love that. And curiosity and courage. I'm going to go back to something that you just said. You were just open with me that I thought I wanted to end my life twice, multiple times, you've been open with me about your spiritual transformation. Those are things you don't hear most sitting CEOs and board directors open up about on a day-to-day basis. Why share it?
Mark Bertolini (20:22):
Because people today, more importantly now today than ever, want people who are real, authentic, approachable, and give a shit. And the only way you do that is by being vulnerable and open about who you are and what you worry about and why it matters to you. Because if I can't describe why it matters to me and what I'm doing and what we're trying to do here at Oscar, why should anybody follow me? Because I'm smart? Who cares? Because I have a lot of money? Nah, it doesn't matter. And so if I'd walked in day one and said, okay, you got to do this, this, this, and this and this, everybody get on let's move. They would've looked at me and said, who the hell are you and why are you here? Why do I want to listen to you? Instead, I took the time to know them, know their names, talk about how they were feeling about their jobs, where their frustrations were, so I knew how to get them from where they were to where they needed to be. And not only that, to exceed and beyond that, that's leadership. It's servant leadership.
Claire Blake (21:17):
Do you have any stories or do you have any people that come to mind where you know your sharing and being open like this has truly made that difference?
Mark Bertolini (21:25):
I have people that call me at all hours of the day and night and reach out and say help, particularly the pain story. I've been very, you know 18 years of sleeping an hour a night, signing up for Dignitas to end my life, setting a date, going through the process, to only find out that it was all inside of me, the ability to make it better. And my first response was much like the 12 step process. I was angry. How could I betray myself this way? I'm a smart person. Why didn't I know? And then remorse. All the people, the right side of my brain shut down for 18 years. And so all the people I may have offended or treated poorly. I went on to apology tour and realized there were just too many people to get to. So I started doing that so
Claire Blake (22:16):
To do a PSA?
Mark Bertolini (22:18):
Yeah, I did. I posted on Facebook, I said to all the people I have insulted throughout my life, I am so deeply sorry. And now that I don't have pain, except when I do stupid things, when I'm working out, I tweak my shoulder or something, which is a good pain as far as I'm concerned compared to what I had before. People reach out and say, how did you do it? And there are so many people, I mean that call, people in wheelchairs, people who are in their homes, they want to end their life and they call me and I say, here's what you do next and here's how you go about doing it. And if you need my introduction, I'll do it for you. And I get calls from people going, oh my God, you saved my life. Now, I didn't save their life, they saved their life. I just showed them where to go. And that's why it's, I mean it's, and people say thank you for being able to talk about the fact that you wanted to end your life because I felt that way too.
Claire Blake (23:21):
What has it felt like, or maybe it's, the question is, what's been the hardest part about feeling again?
Mark Bertolini (23:29):
I cry at stupid dog commercials.
Claire Blake (23:33):
That's so good.
Mark Bertolini (23:36):
I'll be watching something on TV and I'll start weeping and I'm going I'm crying at dog commercials. Oh my God, what is wrong with me?
Claire Blake (23:45):
That is too good. I'd be tempted to ask you about your ring, which has an incredible story to it, but I am not able to really explain to people who are listening the full picture of your ring. So I'm going to ask you about something that I'm definitely not going to ask to see, which is the tattoo on your back.
Mark Bertolini (24:02):
Well,
Claire Blake (24:02):
Tell me what your tattoo
Mark Bertolini (24:05):
I've got six tattoos. I've got tattoos all over me.
Claire Blake (24:07):
Alright, well tell me about the one that means the most to you and a mantra that you have tattooed on your back.
Mark Bertolini (24:12):
Yeah, my tattoo on my back says soham. And soham is a tenet of the Hindu way of life, which is the realization that I am part of everything and everything is part of me. And that time really doesn't exist. Everything that's ever happened or will happen is all happening now and we're just too primitive to see it. And if we realize how tightly aligned we are as people to all things, like one of my favorite stories is the Lenape Indians used to say that when you die, you come to a land bridge and every animal you ever interacted with is on that land bridge and they decide whether or not you can go forward based on how you related with them. Because they're all the same thing. And I'm reading this book right now called The Arrogant Ape. It's about the fact that humans think we're superior because we're smarter and we don't smell, see or hear things the way all of our flora and fauna around us do. And they may be just smarter than we are. And so this idea that I am that, was what soham means. I am that and everything is me is just a profound way to think about it.
Claire Blake (25:23):
I think if I thought through the story you've shared, what a personal journey. I think I'm really inspired by the way that you've even just shared openly and a great reminder of how important that is for CEOs and board directors and senior executives at large companies because it does speak volumes. More than you could put in any culture deck or any leadership study, the authenticity you've showed. But I think the reminder of not only just show compassion, but only surround yourself with people who are both curious and courageous. And if they're not, just run. It's a pretty remarkable takeaway. So Mark, this has been awesome. Thank you for sharing so abundantly.
Mark Bertolini (26:05):
Thank you so much, Claire. So good to be with you.
Claire Blake (26:09):
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