Over the past three weeks, we published a series on the challenges industry inertia poses to health system marketers who want to pursue the principles of ServingOverSelling. The series was deep, research- and data-based, academic and long-form content. So for today’s article, let’s shrink the aperture down to a five-minute window that says as much about why ServingOverSelling is an essential strategy to meet the moment as any deep treatise could.
Last week, I was conducting ongoing research on the widespread practice of health systems acquiring sports sponsorships. I’m leveraging Claude AI to help with the research in scouring health system and sports team websites for evidence of sponsorships, and while it conducts its runs, I can work on other things. So on Thursday of last week, as Claude conducted one of its runs, the next item on my to-do list was to research ACA health plans for my family. I’m currently on COBRA, but that runs out in April, and as a small business owner, my options for an employer-sponsored plan are slim to non-existent. So for the first time in my life, it was time to purchase a plan from the exchange. I had already figured out the plan type (“Gold”) and network that best matched my current coverage, so now with 2027 plan rates available, I could price out the options.
Using Minnesota’s exchange website, I quickly filled out the information on the coverage we would need and up popped the options. The best way to describe my reaction was a verbal guffaw – the lowest priced plan showed a monthly premium of $3,400, along with a $4,000 deductible and an out-of-pocket max of $19,000. Based on my calculations using our claims from 2026, we could expect to pay $54,000 in healthcare costs in 2027 from premiums, deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance, and possibly more (I deal with a number of chronic conditions that drive that number higher than most people would have to face). I’ll say again, $54,000 for healthcare alone, with a premium 20% higher than my current COBRA premium. Higher than COBRA! After my initial cynical laugh passed, the next thought was W.T.F.
As I looked the plan and pricing over, Claude pinged me that it had finished its research run. The runs were focused on specific leagues, so for example, it would search for Major League Baseball sponsorships, complete its run, and I would review the results, clarify anything it needed, and answer questions Claude posed. Throughout my career, as I’ve called out ineffective marketing strategies and the need for change, I’ve followed a mantra of not calling out specific health system brands or marketing individuals by name. (My belief is that it does no good to cast blame or criticize the very people and organizations whom I hope to help.) So in that spirit, I won’t name which health system plan I was reviewing, nor the league which Claude had just finished reviewing in that moment. But what it showed, given the ACA plan pricing I had just uncovered minutes earlier, was a lightning bolt of painful irony.
The very plan that I had priced out at $3,400/mo. was issued by one specific health system, and that system had just popped up in Claude’s research as participating in a multiyear pro-team sponsorship worth more than $5 million a year. So this health system was spending $5 million annually to sponsor a patch on a pro team’s uniform, and its health plan premium was going to cost my family more than our mortgage. Did this sports sponsorship directly drive the health plan cost to such extreme heights? Well, in a small way, probably resulting in a few dollars of that sky-high monthly premium. Are sports sponsorships like this the reason millions can’t afford healthcare in America? They aren’t the primary reason, no, but they certainly don’t help.
But did that sports sponsorship symbolize so much of what is wrong with healthcare in the U.S. today? Damn right it did. As I will outline in my upcoming study, sports sponsorships are probably the apex of wasteful health system promotional spending – a strategy that is notoriously impossible to measure in terms of impact, typically only supports awareness (an attribute most health systems do just fine in anyway), and might be seen as a giant middle finger to a public struggling with healthcare costs. And to top it all off, a strategy that is typically driven by vanity and competitive pressures.
In a five-minute window, the principles of ServingOverSelling were reinforced to me in a visceral way. Until health systems stop wasting money on unnecessary marketing efforts like sports sponsorships, they will have a hard time defending themselves as the calls for fundamental changes in the U.S. healthcare system continue to grow.