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Hey there.

Divian Ho is a health economist at Rice University and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

And since early 2024, she's been giving talks at HR conferences, which is not a typical gig for an academic economist?

Yes, economists don't usually do that. We love to go talk at our own conferences.

But she has been eager to spread a pretty big message.

There's a potential to save workers a lot of money.

And a few weeks ago, she sent me an email asking for help with what she's trying to do.

She wants folks to send her hospital bills for a study she thinks could be part of saving people a lot of money.

And she wondered if I would encourage people to pitch in.

And honestly, I wanted to say yes before I really even knew anything specific about the

study. Now, I should say, Vivian Ho has been a donor to this show. That's actually how I met her

and learned about her work and became kind of a fan. Over the last few years, she's been digging up

and publishing evidence we need to push back

against the way healthcare keeps getting more and more expensive. Now, this is stuff a lot of

us suspected, to say the least, stuff reporters have documented examples of, but she's demonstrated

their actual trends, not one-offs.

...