Mark Bertolini

“Skiing one day and had gone into the woods and caught an edge looking over my shoulder and hit a tree, broke my neck, and slid 60 feet headfirst down into a river in a coma. I broke five of my vertebrae macerated my brachoplexus, disconnected my nerve root fro…”

“With that in mind, every day when you wear this ring, look at it and ask yourself, am I spending my time with the right people doing right things? And if you're not, run.”

“In your heart, you need to find compassion for the journey they're on because everyone has their own journey in life, but physically run.”

“When people hand me spreadsheets, I remember them, and when the cell changes, and I view myself as a forensic scientist looking at spreadsheets to see which cells were changed in order to make the numbers work. Yeah, and I can see it. So it actually glows on t…”

“Platonists are people who think the great idea, communicate it, and consider their job done. And then the Aristotelians actually have to translate it into real work. And I found that being an Aristotelian was far more powerful than being a Platonist. There are…”

“Aetna hired me after they started, ran into trouble to help them fix the company. They were losing a million dollars a day when I showed up in twenty-twenty-two and we had to fix that, and that took a, took us on a whole journey.”

“While I thought I was right a hundred percent of the time, I'm really only right about 35% of the time, but it's just the issue of making a decision and moving forward. And if you have a good management process around it will get better as you go along.”

“So one of the first things I said at Oscar is, We are a pirate ship filled with cannons among Spanish galleons filled with gold. All we have to do is take their business. They don't think we can succeed. We're too small. We have none of the ballast that they c…”

“Well, if you create Enormous capacity, and you give people no sensitivity to price by giving them coverage , you have created a great inflationary monster. And that's what's happened in large part.”

“So we now have employers who buy insurance for a large group of people providing a limited range of benefits that on average control the price of their, of that benefit without really looking at the individual requirements underneath and what people need. And …”

“My son had T cell gamma delta lymphoma. Only 34 people, all men had ever been diagnosed with it. He was the youngest at 16, and it had a six month end date.”

“It was made by Fresenius. The Fresenius CEO was in Austria. He brought it back with him to Boston. We gave it to my son, and four weeks later his hair started growing back, and his starvation, his albumin went from .2 to four. And he came home, and this was in…”

“His kidneys were damaged. So, he got my left kidney two years later, because I had the best match for a kidney, and they did it laparoscopically.”

“What we found is that the people in the highest quintile of stress spent 2500 dollars more a year on health care than the average employee. So we put everybody through these programs, we had them journal, and after 12 weeks, heart rate, variability, cortisol l…”

“I was at the JP Morgan conference on January first, January second of 2015, and I announced it in front of 240 of our three hundred and forty million shares and said, we're going to do this. I didn't ask the board because they said, well, how did your board le…”

“Every 50 basis points change in that trend was nine hundred and eighty million dollars of margin.”

“I was getting ready to go to Switzerland to end my life at Dignitas. It's an assisted suicide organization, but I had to prove I had intractable pain. And pain that can't be cured. And so, I was sent to a doctor, and the doctor evaluated me, and the doctor sai…”

“Your salary pays for the bills, your bonus pays for the baubles, and your stock is never to be touched. It's part of generational wealth. It's for the future and to help others.”

“So when I left out and I had three million shares of stock, I never touched them. And I didn't expect it to ever be at 208 dollars a share, because I took over, it was nine dollars a share.”

“The vast majority of it went into a foundation called Anahata, which is the heart chakra and yoga, where I joyfully help food banks. I do environment education and community sustainability, and I give away close to 12 to fifteen million dollars a year doing th…”

“And at Aetna, when I had 652% total shareholder return over eight years, and we, when we looked at the underlying, only a third of it related to earnings, and two thirds of it related to the price earnings multiple.”

“Your zip code is far more important than your genetic code. Where you live matters more than what you are.”

“Ava lost her role as the head of that bone marrow transplant program, largely because that cost that hospital a lot of money to have them in the hospital for a year and a half in an intensive unit.”

“If you do it, you have to do it wholeheartedly. That, that what blows startups up is, is if you say, oh, I'm gonna take a different role now, and then you don't, and people still come to you when you tell them, oh, yeah, I would do this, you know, but whatever…”

“Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, introduced a plan for Aetna employees that asks them if they want to opt in to track their sleep, and if they get Seven hours or more. They're given 300 dollars.”