One Big Beautiful Episode - Health, Healthcare and Health Insurance

August 27, 2025

By Matt Miner, CFP®, MBA

Why This Episode

Sometimes the best ideas come from the people closest to you. After I interviewed Steve Grant, author of Mailman, about how a pandemic layoff led him to join up with the USPS to get healthcare, my son Ben listened to the episode. He popped his head into my office:

“Dad, that was a really good episode. But you need to keep going. If you don’t have something new for next week, you’ll lose momentum.”

Smart kid. Ben even suggested I call Tim Kennedy for an interview — a great idea, but not one I could line up overnight. So instead, I pulled out a topic that emerged in my conversation with Steve: health, healthcare, and how to pay for it.

This post — and the episode that goes with it — knits these threads together at a high level.

Health: It’s Better to Have Health Than Need Healthcare

Let’s start with the obvious but often ignored truth: it’s better to have health than to need healthcare.

The U.S. healthcare system excels at acute care. Break a bone, have a heart attack, need surgery at 2 a.m.? You’re in the best place in the world. But when it comes to chronic conditions — Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity — the system struggles. Prevention and personal responsibility are the only tools to wage this war on bad health.

These resources shaped my thinking:

From these, I distilled a practical framework:

  • Strength + cardio. Build muscle and train your VO₂ max.

  • Intermittent fasting. Even something as simple as three meals a day with no snacks.

  • Whole30-style eating. Anti-inflammatory, nutrient-dense food.

  • Occasional feasting. Part of a sustainable rhythm.

As Attia says, think of the Centenarian Decathlon. Picture yourself at 100 years old: Do you want to carry groceries, play with grandkids, or climb stairs? Work backward. What do you need to train for today so you can do those things decades from now?

Lessons From Jason Fung: Fasting Isn’t a Fad

Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist, reframed how I think about food. His research shows that obesity and Type 2 diabetes are largely diseases of insulin resistance, caused by constantly elevated insulin from constant eating.

For most of history, humans didn’t graze. We ate when food was available, then fasted until it wasn’t. Our bodies were designed for that rhythm.

Fung’s prescription is simple:

  • Daily fasting windows. 16:8 is a popular starting point — 16 hours fasting, 8 hours eating.

  • Longer fasts. 24 or 36 hours once or twice a week for added benefit.

The benefits? Lower insulin, reduced inflammation, improved weight control, and in many cases reversal of Type 2 diabetes.

I’m not a doctor. I’m a financial planner. But fasting was a key tool I was missing from my health toolkit.

Healthcare at the Point of Service: Brilliant and Broken

Even with good habits, life happens. You fall off a ladder. Your child breaks an arm. Chest pain sends you to the ER.

At that moment, you enter the U.S. healthcare system — brilliant and broken all at once. Brilliant because the technology and expertise are world-class. Broken because costs are opaque, unpredictable, and often shocking.

What You Can Do:

  1. Ask questions. What is this procedure for? Are there alternatives? How much will it cost?

  2. Be prepared to negotiate. If paying cash, always ask: “What’s your lowest prepay cash price?” Discounts of 70–90% aren’t unusual.

  3. Advocate for yourself and loved ones. Don’t be a passive participant. Engage.

Just as you wouldn’t retire without a plan, don’t wait until an emergency to think about how you’ll handle healthcare decisions.

Paying for Healthcare: Two Main Models

You can lift weights, fast, and sleep well — but you’ll still need a plan to pay for care. WPF tackles two of ‘em.

1. Traditional Health Insurance

The model most people know: you pay premiums, face deductibles and co-pays, and in return your insurer negotiates prices and covers catastrophic costs.

Pros:

  • Peace of mind for major medical events.

  • Access to large provider networks.

  • Many preventive services are included

Cons:

  • Rising premiums.

  • High deductibles.

  • Limited provider choice.

Planning Tips:

  • High Deductible Plans + HSAs. If you’re healthy, this combo can be powerful. HSAs are tax-advantaged and portable.

  • Employer Coverage Analysis.

    • For couples, compare both employers’ plans carefully. Sometimes it makes sense for each spouse to stay on their own plan.

    • Besides that, analyze which spouse’s plan is the best one – either in terms of price or access to care – to insure the kiddos.

2. Christian Healthcare Sharing Ministries

Not insurance, but faith-based communities where members share one another’s medical costs. Examples include Samaritan Healthcare Ministries, Medi-Share, and Christian Healthcare Ministries.

Pros:

  • Lower monthly costs.

  • Sense of community and shared values.

  • Encouragement and personal notes when members help cover your bills.

Cons:

  • Not legally binding like insurance.

  • Exclusions for pre-existing conditions.

  • More hands-on management.

My family has been members of Samaritan since 2017. They’ve helped us cover two significant medical events, and the experience has been positive overall. For routine care, we pay cash.

Health, Healthcare, and Money: Woven Together

It’s tempting to treat these as separate silos — your health habits over here, your healthcare system experiences over there, and your financial planning in yet another bucket. But they’re deeply connected.

  • Your health practices (strength training, fasting, Whole30, sleep) determine how much care you’ll likely need.

  • Your knowledge of the system (asking questions, negotiating, paying cash when appropriate) shapes how much care will cost.

  • Your financial plan (insurance choices, HSAs, healthcare sharing) determines whether you’re ready to cover the financial costs of accessing care, now and in the future.

Health is not just a medical issue. It’s a financial issue. A family issue. A life issue.

Practical Next Steps

Here are a few practical ways to apply today’s discussion:

  1. Pick one health habit. Add strength training, try a 16:8 fast, or read Outlive.

  2. Review your insurance. As I write in August 2025, open enrollment is coming. Compare plans, check deductibles, and see if an HSA makes sense.

  3. Explore alternatives. If traditional insurance feels crushing, look into healthcare sharing ministries.

  4. Practice self-advocacy. The next time you visit a doctor, ask about necessity, alternatives, and cost.

Small steps compound. Your future self — whether at 60, 80, or 100 — will thank you.

Final Word

Peter Attia urges us to train today for the life we want at 100. Jason Fung reminds us that fasting is not starvation — it’s part of our design. The Hartwigs challenge us to eat foods that nourish, not inflame.

And the messy world of U.S. healthcare financing reminds us to plan ahead, because sooner or later, every one of us will be a patient.

So here’s my encouragement: take one small step this week. Whether it’s a workout, a conversation with HR about benefits, or a call to a healthcare sharing ministry — start moving forward.

Because the goal is not just to live longer. It’s to live better.

Transcript

Matt Miner (00:01.998) Steve Stewart, we're gonna try to do a solo episode. Here we go.

Matt Miner (00:13.014) Last week, my guest Steve Grant and I spent time talking about how his need for employer-provided health insurance led him to his job at the USPS. And then a few things happened. Earlier this morning, my son Ben listened to the whole episode with Steve, judged it good, and stuck his head in my home office. Dad, he said. Son, I replied. That was a really good episode with Steve Grant. Now you need to keep going, because people are going to listen to it and enjoy it, but you need something for them next week too.

And if you don't do it, you're going to lose all your momentum. Do you think you could get Tim Kennedy on the show? Tim Kennedy? That's a great idea, Ben. I could definitely ask Tim on the show, but I'm pretty confident it's not going to be in time for next week. However, with health insurance, open enrollment coming up and Steve Grant and I almost getting derailed on this topic, I thought I could bring you a show about health, healthcare and paying for healthcare.

These topics have been big on my mind for the last half dozen years as we have done without traditional health insurance and as I dive deeper into my forties. Hey and welcome to the Workpants Finance podcast. I'm Matt Miner, your money guide and Workpants Finance is the show for MBAs, business owners and other professional, excuse me. I'm gonna go back to hey and welcome.

I'm gonna adjust my mic a little too. Hey and welcome to the WorkPants Finance podcast. I'm Matt Miner, your money guide and WorkPants Finance is the show for MBAs, business owners and other professionals who want their financial plan to work as hard as they do. Now here's your money guide prescription. It's better to have health than need healthcare. And when it comes to healthcare, US healthcare is super good at treating acute conditions like a broken leg and really bad at treating chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. So if you can, avoid or eliminate chronic conditions and use healthcare just to treat acute conditions. Easier said than done, I know, and I know that we're not in control of our own health. You can see the Gospel of Matthew chapter 5 verse 36. However, there are things that can help. First, read Pete Attia's book, Outlive. Then go read Jason Fung's book, The Obesity Code.

Matt Miner (02:30.146) Finally, read Dallas and Melissa Hartwig's It Starts with Food. After that, here's what you do. Some kind of cardio and resistance training. How about walking in burpees? Next up, you can create an intermittent fasting plan. Here's a radical one. Start with three meals per day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with no snacks. Finally, when you're not fasting, eat Whole 30, according to Dallas and Melissa's approach. And of course, I don't want to forget

Along with all of this, you can layer in feasting a small percentage of the time. That's it. We'll talk some other time about why the approach outlined above is a key part of anyone's best financial plan. But for now, go read the books. Now this episode needs some extra disclaimers. First, in case you can't tell, I'm not a doctor. I speak from my experience and I reference some resources that have been helpful to me. Second, this is an emotionally and politically fraught topic and this episode isn't even going to try to sort that out. Instead, we take the world as it is, rather than how I wish it to be, and provide you with tools for navigating what can feel like a jungle. This is one big beautiful episode on health, healthcare, and health insurance. Be healthy, get care, and pay for it. Find more at workpantsfinance.com slash 49.

Steve, here's the main episode. This episode grew out of a health kick I've been on for the last two plus years. I haven't shared about it because I haven't been publishing. And also because when you talk about these things, you kind of want to make sure it's not like a flash in the pan. So two years on, I'm ready to go. Let me give my efforts a corporatey kind of name. We'll call it the Matt Miner Health Initiative. And it started when I read It Starts With Food by Hartwig.

And then I read Outlive by Pete Attia. And then I started CrossFit in August of 2023, first with Josh and then with Josh and Ben. Just a few months ago, I read Jason Fung's The Obesity Code and immediately got all the rest of his books. Then I signed up for Function Health's Big Blood Panel. And then I got a continuous glucose monitor from a Canadian medical supply house. And then I bought my Oura Ring and found out how much two beers with dinner mess with my sleep. Yeah, that's another book for you is Why We Sleep by Walker. But keeping going on here. This topic featured strongly in the Steve Grant podcast. And then Ben Miner told me to make another episode and I couldn't get Tim Kennedy on short notice. So here we are. As we go, I hope you'll see how connected health, healthcare and paying for healthcare are. And I hope you'll see the connections between Hartwig, Attia and Fung related to these topics. For information,I read another half dozen plus books on this topic, all of which had something helpful to say, but to try to distill this down and create the strongest connections for you, we're going to stick with, It Starts With Food, Outlive, and The Obesity Code. So first, health. Health itself, lessons from Attia and Fung. Health is highly personal. In fact, it's hard to think of anything that's much more personal. It's your body, it's your energy, your ability to live the way you prefer.

My thinking on this have been really strongly shaped by Pete Attia and Jason Fung. So first, Pete Attia is a doc who practices what he calls the science of longevity. His idea is not just to live longer, but to live better. To be the kind of person who at 85 years old can carry groceries, get down on the floor to play with grandkids, or climb stairs without collapsing. I'm gonna share three takeaways from the book and then an example of his approach in what Attia calls the centenarian decathlon. First key idea from Attia is that inflammation is your enemy and it steals your health. How we eat contributes a lot to chronic inflammation. In my experience, Whole30 is an excellent way to cut out a lot of pro-inflammatory food. The second key idea from Pete Atia is that you lose muscle mass and cardio capacity as you age.

Since you're going to lose muscle mass and cardio capacity, you want to be losing from the highest point on the curve, specifically the curve of how much muscle you can have and how high your VO2 max is. Finally, the flip side of the coin and some good news is that although you're losing muscle mass and cardio capacity as you age and though it becomes harder to climb up those curves as you get older, nevertheless, wherever you are, you can improve these measures. But the sooner you start, the easier it is and the better for you. Attia highlights all this in his goal of the centenarian decathlon. These are events that you might want to do when you're 100 years old. He comes up with a simple but powerful image. He says, imagine you're 100. Do you want to be able to do? Like, do you want to be able to walk a mile, travel, pick up a suitcase? Says now, work backward. What would you need to do today to train for that? It turns out that if you want to do these things in your older life, you have to be strong and healthy in middle life. And that framing turns health into something proactive. It's about training for the life you want in older age. Attia points to some key levers. Strength training is for everybody. Muscle mass is one of the strongest predictors of how long you will be healthy in your life. Cardio fitness matters not only for endurance, but also for resilience against sudden health shocks like illness or acute injury. then metabolic health is a key aspect of all of this to remain sensitive to insulin, able to not have elevated blood sugar and avoiding slow creep toward diabetes and heart disease. So this all ties beautifully then into Jason Fung's work who writes a lot about fasting. Fung is a Canadian nephrologist, that means a kidney expert.

He's best known for his work on obesity and type 2 diabetes. And he's written a lot about intermittent fasting, not as a fad diet, but as a tool to restore natural rhythms in your body. Here's the gist. For most of human history, we didn't eat three square meals a day plus snacks. We had periods of feasting and periods of fasting. Our bodies were designed for this way of eating. Because insulin levels rise when we eat and fall when we fast, we want periods of fasting to clear insulin out of the blood. In fact, a key insight that Fung shares and documents really well is that insulin levels are what lead to weight gain. So lowering insulin levels over time is a key lever in not being overweight. So in the modern food environment, constant access, ultra-processed food, the sad marketing that encourages grazing, your insulin stays high almost all the time, and that's a recipe for insulin resistance and getting heavier.

Matt Miner (09:36.728) So Fung's approach is easy. He says, give your body a break from eating with at least 16 hours of fasting and not more than an eight hour eating window. He also talks about 24 and 36 hour fasts once or twice a week. I'm about 18 or 20 hours into a fast right now and I'm feeling great. Although I will be feasting this evening in Eastern North Carolina. So fasting improves insulin sensitivity, lowers inflammation and in a lot of cases helps people reverse the march toward type two diabetes. Clearly, I'm not a doctor. You should talk to yours, but Fung's insights about fasting have been incredibly helpful to me and filled a missing piece in my kind of overall health toolkit.

All right, now let's talk about healthcare at the point of service. So you've done all the right things. You're lifting weights, you're fasting, you're sleeping, you're managing your stress. Life still happens. You fall off a ladder, your kid breaks an arm, you wake up with chest pain. At that moment, you're dropped into the US healthcare system. And here's the thing. The system is both brilliant and broken at the same time. It's brilliant because if you need a stent in your heart at 2 a.m., there's a surgeon who can do it. It's broken because you may have no idea what it will cost until weeks later when you get your bill. For most people, healthcare at the point of service is disorienting. You walk into an ER, an urgent care or a doctor's office and you lose control of your costs. You're funneled into a system where pricing is opaque. It's driven by negotiations between insurers and providers. If you're uninsured, you may get billed at the rack rate, which can be two to three times what insurance companies pay, though you can negotiate these prices.

If you are insured, you still face deductibles, copays, and out-of-network charges. And this is where preparation matters. Just like you wouldn't go into retirement without a plan, you need a plan for your healthcare before you need it. A key aspect of this is advocating for yourself, or if you're in a position to do so, advocating for your loved ones. Ask questions of providers. This indicates that you're engaged with the process, that you're an active participant and not a passive recipient.

Matt Miner (11:46.444)

And if you're paying cash, you have more leverage than you think. Many clinics and hospitals offer substantial discounts if you pay upfront, sometimes as much as 70 to 90%. So here's your line. You look them in the eye and say, what is your lowest cash price paid in advance? All right, part three, paying for healthcare. This is where the rubber meets the road. You can do everything right, but you still need a plan to pay for care that you'll eventually need.

There are basically two models that I'm going to talk about in this show. First, traditional insurance. This is the past most, excuse me, Steve, we're to redo that. First, traditional insurance. This is the path most people are familiar with. You'll pay a monthly premium. You may have deductibles and co-pays and in exchange, the insurer negotiates prices and covers catastrophic costs. You probably also get some preventive care thrown in. The pros of this type of plan, peace of mind, access to health networks and coverage for major events. Cons, you may have rising premiums, high deductibles, limited transparency, and you may or may not be able to choose the providers that you would prefer. So key planning areas when it comes to traditional health insurance relate to qualified high deductible health plans. Sometimes you'll see them written QHDHP paired with a health savings account. You'll see that written as HSA. And also another key tool in your toolkit here is analyzing which spouses plan to use for each spouse, often the answer is both, each employed spouse on his or her own employer's plan. And then to further look at which spouse's plan to have the kids on, one is usually better than the other, either due to price or access to particular providers. The other thing I wanna talk about is Christian healthcare sharing ministries. These aren't insurance, they're faith-based organizations where members contribute monthly and those contributions are used to pay medical bills for other members.

Examples include Metashare, Samaritan Healthcare Ministries, and Christian Healthcare Ministries. Pros here include lower monthly costs, community support, and shared values. are, these are not legally binding, like insurance, there are exclusions for pre-existing conditions, and there are sometimes limitations on what is covered. My own family has been members of Samaritan Healthcare Ministries since 2017. They have covered two large items for us in eight years. One was a couple thousand dollars and another was about $5,000. For routine care, we pay cash. Our experience with this has generally been very good. It's a little bit kind of more hands-on management, but it's also really sweet when you receive these gifts in the mail from other members of Samaritan Healthcare Ministries with notes saying, we hope you get well, we're praying for you, things like that. So we have found this to be a really good option for our family. Our least favorite part of working with Samaritan Healthcare Ministries is dealing with the front office employees in doctor's offices. When we say like, what's your lowest prepay cash price, sometimes they look at us like we have three heads and that's not that fun.

So let me try to tie this together. Health, and paying for healthcare aren't separate silos. They're parts of the same fabric. You got your personal health practices. We've talked about strength, fasting, sleep. You have your knowledge of the system, asking questions, paying cash when it's appropriate. These things will shape how much your care will cost. And then finally you have your own financial, excuse me. Finally you have your own financial choices related to insurance, how much cash you have on hand, Christian healthcare sharing, things like this help shape your ability to absorb healthcare expenses without breaking the bank.

Matt Miner (15:56.27)

Steve, here's my outro. The mid-roll follows.

All right, that's a lot. If you're still with me, thank you. I hope this conversation gave you some practical ideas and some motivation. Health is not just a medical issue. It's a financial issue, a family issue, and ultimately a life issue. Pete Attia talks about training for your centenarian self. Jason Fung reminds us that fasting is part of our design. And when we're eating, eating a Whole 30 is a great way to get the nutrition we need and avoid inflammation in our bodies. The messy complicated world of healthcare financing reminds us to plan ahead. So here's my encouragement. Pick one takeaway. Maybe it's adding a strength workout. Maybe it's finding a doctor who's friendly to cash customers. Maybe it's reviewing your insurance plan or exploring a healthcare sharing ministry. These small steps compound and your future self, whether 60, 80 or 100, will thank you. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk again soon.

Matthew Miner