Dr. John Oertle, Solidarity HealthShare’s Chief Medical Officer, joins Chris DeSimone of Wake Up, Tucson to discuss the continued need for patient advocacy and the importance of finding a doctor who will best support your individual needs.
Chris DeSimone (00:00):
Seven nine zero twenty forty is the phone number. Murray, you can be following along on our next part of it with Solidarityhealthshare.org. And we have filling in the pinch hitter, if you will. Yes. Is Dr. John Oertle? Oertle? Yes, John, good morning. Welcome to Wake Up Tucson.
Dr. John Oertle (00:25):
Good morning. Great to be with you.
Chris DeSimone (00:27):
And what do you do over at the old Solidarity?
Dr. John Oertle (00:34):
So it’s Solidarity. So I’m one of the co-founders along with President Chris Faddis, and I am the Chief Medical Officer at Solidarity.
Chris DeSimone (00:42):
How long have you been a doctor?
Dr. John Oertle (00:45):
So I’ve been a doctor now for over 12 years, and I practice really, again, I specialize in precision and genomic medicine, so I’m very much familiar with genomics and precision specifically in the field of cancer research. But I started Solidarity along with Chris to be able to provide lifesaving great Catholic medical care for Catholics and Christians that want good, affordable and ethical healthcare options.
Chris DeSimone (01:19):
So talk about where we at as a guy who’s on the doctor side of this equation. Chris and I and Brad have talked about it over and over the years, but I want to hear from your perspective, what is the state of healthcare for the average Arizonan right now? And then how does it differentiate between someone in my age and someone who’s now over 65 in the Medicare world, but let’s do the state of medical care for the average person right now. Where are we at because it’s not a great place?
Dr. John Oertle (01:56):
Well, yeah, from a healthcare side, and I think just from everyday arizonans, they feel and understand that the healthcare is broken and that it’s not working for them. And it’s difficult even to be able to, not just their insurance, but been hard to find doctors who are willing to spend enough time with the patient to be able to actually find root causes, find out what’s actually going on, not just to be able to mask something with a pill and just get ’em out of the office. And so when you’re dealing with an acute disease, again, we’ve got some of the best hospitals in the world to be able to deal with acute heart disease or coronary artery bypasses. But when you’re in a chronic state or you need a little more time with a doc, we’ve really found that again, that many Americans are feeling that the healthcare system is not working for them or that their doctors aren’t invested in actually getting them well or healing.
(02:54):
And so this is really when, again, being able to have an insurance, insurance really created a context of being able to, doctors are doing what they’re getting paid for. And unfortunately with an insurance company, if you’re not actually supporting lifesaving treatment options, if you’re not actually helping support the doctor patient relationship to be able to get the best kind of healthcare, then oftentimes doctors are not doing this for their patients. And so from my standpoint, again, Solidarity, we created Solidarity to really help to support that doctor patient relationship, to be able to give that seat back to the actual doctor and patients to be able to really provide life supporting options to patients. I just recently published an article on the National Review. We’re talking about even doctors not offering these life-saving options to parents and who are being threatened premature delivery, even at the edge of viability.
(03:58):
They’re not being offered these options. And the data is very conclusive that if you actually just support and treat these babies and mothers that are threatened to have early, early pregnancies at around 24 to 21 weeks, if you provide those lifesaving options and your insurance company is going to provide those lifesaving options where at Solidarity we share into these lifesaving options, then your babies actually have a fighting chance to be able to actually survive. So this is just one example, but again, it comes to a lot of different examples regards to our American healthcare system that is not really being supported by lifesaving options and treatment options for doctors and patients.
Chris DeSimone (04:41):
I feel like the way, especially since covid, that there’s better care getting done by physicians’ assistants, nurse practitioners than MDs. And I feel like the general practitioner MD has now become a conduit for billing from the consolidation of the big hospital systems. Does that sound accurate to you?
Dr. John Oertle (05:05):
Chris, that is incredibly well said because that’s exactly what is happening. And unless you’re outside of that system, you are a conduit of a pill pusher or a billing system that your system is not working on behalf of the patient. And I often like to say, even when I started into this, I think about an insurance company, and I’ve always thought, well, if you’re a part of a big Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna United, the biggies in the insurance world, if you have an insurance, you’re paying an arm and a leg for this insurance, but really they don’t have your best interest in mind. The interest that they have in mind is their shareholders. It’s their shareholders. And what we’ve seen since the Affordable Care Act is that the tiers for the shareholders of the big BUCA systems are on a tear. They’ve continued to be able to drive, and I see this because I oftentimes then see people that are stuck in this insurance conglomerate that are actually needing care, but the insurance company is unwilling to be able to provide or cover the care that they need.
(06:10):
And so this is really a concern that I have. And with Solidarity, we kind of break those boundaries because again, it’s not insurance, but we share into these therapies that are able to actually support our members’ alternative integrative therapies. And with Covid, there was a lot of alternative integrative therapies that were actually really successful beyond just again, the concerns and problems of the remdesivir and such. So again, we were able to really help us and support a lot of our actual members getting the care that they needed as a result of the Covid crisis, we were offering these other therapies and really respected doctors and their expertise and the research, the data that was behind the actual treatments that were being provided, instead of just looking at it from a top down bureaucrat systematic model, really trusting a doctor and their patient to be able to make good decisions.
Chris DeSimone (07:02):
I want to do the thing, this doesn’t really work on radio. Everyone listening, raise your hand if this is you. You have a general practitioner MD that every time you go, you never actually see the MD. How many out there raise your hands?
Dr. John Oertle (07:18):
Large majority. Large majority.
Chris DeSimone (07:21):
So literally, I have a loved one who has this MD, they were bought out by one of the big hospital systems. She keeps telling me everyone who’s your primary care? And she keeps saying this woman’s name, but I’ve never seen her on the last seven things that we went to go see her on. Right? And one of those was one of these useless Medicare wellness annual checkups where they took her blood pressure, they took her weight, everything was fine there. Then they answered a crazy questionnaire including what organizations do you belong to? Real question. And then I go, what are we doing here? And she goes, well, let me take this person’s blood pressure again. I was like, you already did. What’s going on here? I’m here. Right.
Dr. John Oertle (08:09):
Well, it’s unfortunate. I’ll take you one further. I mean, for me, I’ve heard story after story about you go to see your doc and you’re getting your cholesterol performed, you’re getting your basic blood work, C-B-C-C-M-P, and yet the patient is feeling like, well, they get told by the doc, well, your cholesterol is a little high. Maybe you have a little elevated blood pressure. They’re going to put you on a couple of medications for the cholesterol and the blood pressure. And you’re thinking, well, that’s well and fine, but everything else looks good. And you’re told by the doc, okay, you’re doing great. Keep up the good work, but you’re feeling that your energy levels are low, your brain isn’t functioning the way that it needs to. And this is where you start to feel that something may be off, but your doctor is never even touching it.
(08:56):
See, this is where you want to dive down deeper. This is what the actual, the level of personalized medicine and actually taking some time to understand, well, why exactly is it that you’re not doing as optimal as you could be? And why is it that you’re feeling a little more sluggish? Why is it that the weight is staying on a little worse than it used to, than 10 years ago? And this is where you can actually optimize your own health. And I think this is really important because we too frequently, it’s almost, I’ve often times in tongue in cheek, I like to say many times I’ve been to Texas, I’ve seen the actual way that Texans treat their cattle and they treat ’em incredibly well. The veterinarians are spot on, they’re taken care of. And oftentimes, I think, man, our American patients being taken care of right now in our healthcare system as well as Texas cattle, because again-
Chris DeSimone (09:52):
John, I want to answer that question for you
Dr. John Oertle (09:53):
Being taken care of-
Chris DeSimone (09:54):
That’s an absolute no. (Yeah, sure.) That’s an absolute no. (Yeah.)
Dr. John Oertle (10:00):
Yeah, unfortunately. But this is where being able to be an advocate, I always share, patients need to be their own advocate. Patients need to be able to, again, this is what I love with the advent of the internet, and obviously you can’t be Dr. Google, but there is something to being able to bring ideas to your physician and finding physicians that will listen to you. Finding physicians that, and I always like to say, find physicians that are open to be able to actually consider ideas and thoughts instead of just following this square peg and around whole mentality that everybody has to fit. What we know is that there’s so many different reasons why patients are chronically ill or not doing what they need to do, or not being optimized or not being on the right specific diets for you. So find doctors that are able to listen and then really make sure that they’re following the data and doing the research.
(10:54):
You can help them with that as far as this goes. And then finding an insurance company or a healthcare like Solidarity that’s going to actually share into these actual things that are able to support you in that journey. So that we have a list of a lot of preferred providers with Solidarity where you can actually go and find doctors that I vetted. I know these doctors, and this is where we actually can help support our members to be able to actually drive them into the care that they’re needing because they’re good doctors and at Solidarity, they’re working with us and our members to provide the kind of care that I believe is appropriate for the dignity of the human person to be able to live their best life.
Chris DeSimone (11:32):
Well, I love what you guys do. We’re huge supporters, and a lot of our listeners have taken advantage of it, and we love what you do. And again, just you got to be your own advocate in everything. But opening up people’s brains to being their own advocate more than ever with their healthcare is huge. So keep up the good work. Dr. John.
Dr. John Oertle (11:54):
Chris, thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
Chris DeSimone (11:57):
Faddis said you weren’t going to be as good as him, but what turned out to be you were just as good, maybe a little better than Faddis. I just want to let you know that.
Dr. John Oertle (12:07):
Oh, oh. I thank you. I’ll make sure I remind him of that frequently.
Chris DeSimone (12:13):
All right. Keep up the great work my friend, solidarityhealthshare.org. It’s the better way to do it in a more ethical way and a more reasonable way for your pocketbook, Dr. John Oertle. Have a great day.
Dr. John Oertle (12:25):
You too. Bye.
Chris DeSimone (12:26):
Later, Amigo. solidarityhealthshare.org.
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Solidarity HealthShare is a non-profit healthcare sharing ministry rooted in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Established in 2016, we operate on the Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, in accordance with the Church’s commitment to promoting life-affirming, faith-based healthcare.
We strive to provide an ethical, community-driven alternative to traditional health insurance. Through direct Member-to-Member sharing, Members are able to access quality healthcare services while preserving their family’s financial, physical, and spiritual health, all at once. Members never need to worry about their healthcare dollars funding immoral medical procedures. We promote a holistic approach to healthcare, emphasizing the importance of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.
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