Ultra-Processed Healthcare: The Silent Killer Worse Than Junk Food

The Hidden Costs of Ultra-Processed Healthcare

Just as ultra-processed foods strip away nutrition while adding harmful ingredients, our healthcare system has become increasingly processed, extracting value from patients and employers while adding layers of administrative complexity that dehumanize everyone.

From Food to Healthcare: The Processing Parallel

Ultra-processed foods take whole ingredients and transform them through industrial processes, adding preservatives, emulsifiers, and sweeteners that maximize shelf life and profit margins while diminishing nutritional value. Research links these foods to obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and autoimmune disorders.

Similarly, ultra-processed healthcare takes what should be a straightforward relationship between caregiver and patient and runs it through a complex processing system that extracts maximum financial value while minimizing actual care delivery. The result? A system where only 23 cents of every healthcare dollar reaches clinicians who provide care.

Stripping Away Humanity

Just as ultra-processed foods strip away essential nutrients, ultra-processed healthcare strips away the human elements that make medicine healing. The consequences are devastating:

• Record levels of burnout among caregivers, with nearly 63% of physicians reporting symptoms

• Physicians having one of the highest suicide rates of any profession

• Nurses leaving the profession in unprecedented numbers

• Patients feeling like "numbers" rather than people

This dehumanization occurs because ultra-processed healthcare prioritizes administrative efficiency and profit over human connection. For every hour physicians spend with patients, they spend nearly two additional hours on paperwork and electronic health records—the administrative equivalent of food fillers.

Administrative Bloat: The Preservatives of Healthcare

The evidence of ultra-processing in healthcare is stark. While the number of physicians grew by 150% between 1975 and 2010, proportional to population growth, healthcare administrators increased by an astonishing 3,200% during the same period.

This explosive growth in administrative roles mirrors how food processors add preservatives, colors, and fillers—ingredients that don't nourish but extend shelf life and improve marketability. In healthcare, these administrative layers don't improve care but do preserve and enhance revenue streams.

Middlemen: The Hidden Ingredients List

Just as ultra-processed foods contain ingredients most consumers can't pronounce or understand, healthcare's complex web of middlemen operates largely unseen:

• Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) that make more profit per vial of insulin than the manufacturers

• Carriers that add fees for recouping money due to their mistakes (e.g., allowing fraud, waste & abuse)

• Consultants who receive undisclosed commissions for steering business

• Network access fees that inflate costs without adding value

These middlemen extract billions from the healthcare system while contributing to a Byzantine structure that makes price transparency nearly impossible.

Harmful Additives: The PBM Revenue Streams

The parallel to food additives is perhaps most evident in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Pharmacy Benefit Managers have developed an astonishing array of "additives" to extract money from the system without adding value:

1. Label Switching: Reclassifying generic drugs as brand drugs to charge higher prices to clients while paying pharmacies lower rates

2. Rebate Retention: Collecting but not passing along rebates on insulin, over-the-counter medications, and non-formulary drugs

3. Spread Pricing: Paying pharmacies one price while charging clients a higher one

4. NDC Manipulation: Switching National Drug Codes to pay pharmacies for cheaper versions while billing clients for expensive ones

5. Clawbacks: Taking back money from pharmacies 90 days after a claim through "Direct and Indirect Remuneration" fees

6. Quantity Manipulation: Dispensing 90-day supplies while charging for 100 days

Like artificial colors and flavors in processed foods, these financial additives serve only to enhance profitability, not improve health outcomes. And just as food labels often disguise additives with technical terms, these practices are hidden in contractual fine print most purchasers never read or understand.

Legal Processing: The Gordian Knot of Healthcare Contracts

Perhaps the most pernicious form of healthcare processing happens at the legal level. Healthcare contracts have evolved into what can aptly be described as "a Gordian Knot designed by Rube Goldberg"—deliberately complex, layered, and impenetrable.

The system is riddled with gag clauses and non-disclosure agreements that operate like Russian nested dolls, each one hiding another level of financial manipulation. As industry insiders note, "where there's mystery, there's margin." This deliberate opacity allows middlemen to extract enormous profits while preventing meaningful cost comparisons or accountability.

The consequences are literally life-threatening. The cost of care has become the third leading cause of death in America, as roughly half of all Americans report avoiding medical care due to cost concerns. Treatable cancers that could be addressed when symptoms first appear progress to terminal stage 4 because patients face cost barriers to simple primary care visits. By the time financial fears are overcome by unbearable symptoms, it's often too late.

Organizations like Health Rosetta, a Public Benefit Corporation and Nautilus Health Institute have demonstrated that simplifying these agreements produces dramatic results. By "deprocessing" legal contracts from hundreds of pages to just a few, these organizations have created transparent healthcare arrangements where:

• Providers receive fair, timely payment

• Employers pay reasonable costs

• Patients access care without financial barriers

• Total costs for procedures like MRIs often drop below what patients previously paid just in deductibles and copays

The Health Rosetta Approach: Whole Foods for Healthcare

Just as the food movement advocates returning to whole, minimally processed ingredients, Health Rosetta and Nautilus Health Institute promote a return to healthcare fundamentals:

1. Direct relationships between healthcare organizations and employers

2. Transparent, simple contracts that both parties understand

3. Elimination of unnecessary administrative layers

4. Fair compensation for actual caregivers

This "whole foods" approach to healthcare has demonstrated that simplifying the system doesn't just reduce costs—it improves quality, enhances provider satisfaction, and creates better patient experiences.

The Way Forward: A Less Processed System

The parallels between ultra-processed foods and ultra-processed healthcare suggest similar solutions. Just as nutrition advocates push for whole foods, clear labeling, and regulation of harmful additives, healthcare reformers must demand:

1. Transparent, simplified contracts and billing

2. Elimination of unnecessary administrative layers

3. Direct relationships between providers and patients

4. Fair distribution of healthcare dollars with more going to actual care

By "deprocessing" healthcare, we can create a system that, like whole foods, delivers better outcomes at lower costs—proving that sometimes the simplest approach is the healthiest.

Join the Healthcare Deprocessing Movement at RosettaFest 2025

Ready to join the movement toward simpler, more effective healthcare? RosettaFest 2025, happening August 24-27 in Denver, is the only gathering that brings together over 1,000 leaders behind thousands of employer and union healthcare successes.

Unlike typical healthcare conferences that maintain industry silos, RosettaFest serves as the connective tissue across the entire ecosystem—employers, benefits professionals, unions, clinical leaders, technology companies, civic leaders, policy makers, and think tanks. It's where those committed to "deprocessing" healthcare share practical strategies and build the relationships needed to transform the system.

Learn more and register at www.rosettafest.org