The car died in the left lane.

Three lanes of traffic, everyone moving, and the dash lit up with a warning I’d never seen: catastrophic event, no power, nothing. No engine. No steering assist coming next. Just me, Bella, and a two-ton machine turning into a paperweight at forty miles an hour.

I had maybe four seconds to decide something.

So I decided. I let the momentum carry me, read the gaps, and coasted across three lanes to a side street before the car rolled to a dead stop. Then I sat there. Engine off. AC off. Bella already starting to pant in the Florida heat. And the strange quiet that comes after the thing you feared actually happens.

Here’s what I noticed in that quiet: I wasn’t waiting for anyone.

The car was never the point

Cars aren’t cars anymore. They’re rolling computers — electrical systems wearing sheet metal. When the brain goes, the whole thing goes. This was a 2019 with about 47,000 miles on it. Not old. Not run into the ground. And it still died like the power got cut at the wall, because that is exactly what a modern car does when the electrical system fails. No power meant it wouldn’t shift into any gear at all, which meant a jump wouldn’t save me and I wasn’t rolling it anywhere. I was calling a tow.

I worked the problem in order. Called the shop I trust. They gave me a window: get it there by five and it could sit safely until Tuesday, when they’d be back to run diagnostics. Called my dad, who happened to be in town, and he drove the twenty-five minutes to come sit in it with me. We tried the jumper cables. Nothing. So we stopped guessing and called the tow.

The tow driver didn’t speak any English. He ran everything through Google Translate, phone held up between us, and we figured it out anyway — two people, a broken car, and the universal language of let’s get this done. He’d come to this country about six years ago, lived in Philadelphia, landed in Florida. He showed up. He did the work. That’s the part that matters.

The whole day went from a plan to no plan to a brand-new plan, reassembled on the shoulder of a road in real time.

And the entire time, one thought kept circling back.

Most people would still be sitting in that car, in the left lane of rush-hour traffic, completely broken down.

The thing nobody teaches you

And they wouldn’t be sitting on the shoulder where it’s safe. They’d be sitting dead in a live lane, hazards blinking, hoping the cars behind them figure it out before someone doesn’t.

I never sat in that lane. The move that got me out of it wasn’t luck and it wasn’t time. I had less than four seconds, and in those four seconds I had to do three things at once: decide whether I still had enough momentum to make it, find a gap in three lanes of moving traffic, and thread a dead two-ton car through that gap to a side road that wouldn’t dump me into the middle of the congestion. Decide, calculate, execute. Before the rolling stopped.

That is not a thing you do in the moment. That is a thing you’ve already become before the moment arrives.

To some of us this feels like common sense. It isn’t. It’s a skill set. Somewhere along the line I was equipped. By my parents, by building a company, by years of operations where the plan blows up and you rebuild it on the fly or you sink. I didn’t become calm on Friday because the moment called for it. I was calm because I’d already built the person who doesn’t freeze. The car just showed me she was still in there.

That’s the uncomfortable truth about breakdown. It doesn’t build your character. It exposes it. Whatever you’ve practiced is what shows up when the dash goes dark.

I’ve seen what perfect looks like

Years ago I was in a motorcade when a lead car blew a tire on the freeway.

Motorcades run fast. We were doing 80, 85 when it went. And here’s the honest part: there was a flinch. Of course there was. Nobody has a blowout at that speed without a hit of adrenaline and a fast, hard correction to keep the car under control. You can’t think your way through that moment. There’s no time to think. Whatever happens in the first half-second is pure reflex, and the skill was never the absence of the flinch. It was what came right after it. The motorcade slowed a hair, the car eased to the shoulder, the right people radioed what just happened, and the choreography took over. The people who had to stay with the package were in another vehicle before the first one fully stopped. Someone hopped out to change the tire fast. Everyone who needed to know already knew, and everyone who didn’t never noticed a thing. From the outside it looked like a planned event. Like it was supposed to happen exactly that way.

It wasn’t planned. It was practiced. That is what the highest level of execution looks like: a catastrophe that reads like a rehearsal because every person already knew their next move before the tire ever blew.

That’s the standard. Here’s the part nobody tells you: you almost never get to build with that team.

You don’t get the operators. You build them.

A few years into building my pet services company, one of my team members was mid-route when her car died. She already had a back seat full of dogs, picked up and buckled into their seat belt harnesses, on their way to a dog adventure. A schedule that doesn’t pause. And a young employee who, left to her own instincts, would have called an app and sat there.

She didn’t sit there. Within minutes we’d converged a couple of other team members on her location, moved the dogs and their harnesses into another vehicle, and kept the day running while she dealt with roadside assistance. The clients never felt a ripple. The dogs got their adventure. Nobody — two-legged or four — got left on the side of a road.

But understand the difference between that and the motorcade. In the motorcade I was surrounded by people who operate at the highest level by default — that’s who they are before they show up. In my service company I was building with people who hadn’t been handed that wiring. Not yet.

I’ll say the part out loud, because anyone running a service business already knows it. Somewhere along the line, we stopped teaching critical thinking. I saw it from millennials on down. And this is not a swipe at younger people. They bring real gifts to a team. But many of them were never taught to think two steps ahead, to ask if this, then what, to solve a problem that doesn’t have a button on a phone. So if you run a service business today, here is your actual job description: you are not only the leader. You are also, often, the parent teaching grown adults the life skills nobody taught them. That is the work. Pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.

And so you build the reflex you can’t hire. The SUV dies, here’s what you do. The plan breaks, here’s who you call. You don’t freeze. You never leave a teammate stranded. Drill it until it stops being a decision and starts being who they are.

Because here is what it actually comes down to. We serve at the pleasure of our customers — people who hand us a key to their home, the most private space they have, and trust us with the animals they love like family. We earn that by watching out for one another. We cover each other. We pitch in.

We do not leave a team member on the side of the road.

That’s not a logistics policy. That’s the whole thing. The preparation, the if this then that, the reflex you drill into people who never had it — all of it exists to serve one rule: nobody on this team waits alone in a hot car for someone to come save them. We come. Every time.

What holds

I’ll be honest with you. This has been a season where everything that can break, breaks. The car was just the part that happened on a Friday in traffic. There’s been heavier. The kind you don’t put in a newsletter yet.

Some mornings the weight of it is the first thing awake before I am. You carry it into the day anyway. You answer the email. You make the call. You show up looking like a person who has it handled, because the work doesn’t pause for your worst week and neither can you.

But I’m noticing something about heavy seasons. They work exactly like that dashboard light. They don’t make you who you are. They show you who you already were. They reveal what you built quietly, on the good days, when nobody was watching and nothing was on fire.

The car died and I coasted to the shoulder. Not because I’m special. Because somewhere along the way I decided that freezing wasn’t an option, and I drilled that decision into myself and everyone around me until it stopped being a decision at all.

Build the muscle now. While the engine’s still running. So that when the dash goes dark, and it will, you don’t sit there waiting to be saved.

You coast to the shoulder. And you work the problem.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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Ted Turner died yesterday at 87. The headlines call him a pioneer. They are not wrong. He also said a line to me in 2001 that I have never forgotten.

The largest merger in American history was still settling into the floors and the air vents of the office buildings it had just consumed. AOL had bought Time Warner. Most people remember the headline. Most people forget how many companies actually fell under that umbrella, how many systems quietly converged, how many tours were given to dignitaries trying to understand what they now owned.

The year before, the AOL Argentina launch had brought me in to help handle a 500-plus international press pool. Months later would be the World Internet Conference in Mexico City. The recruitment for a full-time role had been moving for over a year, and the offer finally landed at the right moment. The job was Senior Project Manager. Liaison between the twelve major divisions and the office of the president. Private jets were already part of the week. The work was good and the company knew it. That was the whole reason for being in the room.

It was my first full week as a salaried employee at headquarters. Late twenties.

I was helping run a tour of the NOC. Network operations center. One of the largest in the world at the time, housing the billing system for the entire customer base. Cold air, sterile floors, towers humming in formation. Dust was the enemy. So was lingering. My colleague, the Senior Vice President of Communications, was leading the front of the group. I was at the back, keeping the dignitaries moving, making sure no one stalled out staring at a server tower.

And then there was Ted Turner.

He was not interested in the tour.

He was interested in me.

The group was small. Under ten people. An elite dignitary tour, not a delegation. Which meant every drift had weight.

He kept stepping back from the lead and walking toward me. The others adjusted around him. The tour did not fall apart. It just kept slowing down. My colleague would push the front forward. Ted Turner would find his way back to me. The pace warped around one man’s attention.

Then Ted Turner said it. Loud enough for the entire group to hear.

“Damn, I gotta get me some parental consent around here.”

I went beet red.

I was in my late twenties. I was wearing a suede wrap dress that went past the knees. I was the liaison between the twelve major divisions and the office of the president, in my first full week on the salaried payroll. And the man who had revolutionized cable news, who had built CNN from nothing, who had reshaped how the world watched itself, who had spent decades fighting to protect American land — had just summed me up in a sentence in front of every dignitary on that tour.

Here is the part that still sits with me.

That afternoon, an email went out to upper leadership thanking my colleague and me for handling the tour. Senior vice presidents. Division presidents. The full top of the org chart on the distribution line.

The email was written by a female senior vice president.

She thanked my colleague for his work.

She thanked me for entertaining Mr. Turner.

It was framed as a joke. It made its way around the office. People laughed.

I read it at my desk and felt the floor drop out from under me. Not for what I knew. Not for the operation I had helped run. For my body. For my looks. For being a body a powerful man wanted to look at instead of the work I had been hired to do.

I laughed it off. What else are you supposed to do when you are one week into the role and the joke is going to the entire C-suite.

But I have not forgotten.

The man is not the whole story.

Ted Turner is a documented part of his own legend. He has said lines like that publicly for decades. The line did not surprise anyone in the room because it was consistent with who he had always been.

What hit harder was the woman who wrote the email.

She had a choice. She had every opportunity to walk over to my office that afternoon and say, I heard what happened. I am sorry. Thank you for handling that with grace. Five sentences. Done. A senior woman extending a hand to a colleague in a moment that mattered.

Instead she put it in writing and sent it to the top of the company as a joke. She knew my role. She had been part of the recruitment. She knew I was sitting in a Senior Project Manager seat reporting up to the office of the president. None of that mattered to her in the moment she sat down to write the email. What mattered was that the line had landed and she had a punchline.

That is the part that taught me what leadership actually is.

What I learned about how to lead.

The powerful man was predictable. The systems around him were the lesson.

Anyone senior enough to challenge the framing had a choice. They could have replied and said, this framing is not okay. None of them did. The joke landed, the tour was a success, the merger marched on, and the woman at the back of the room learned what the culture actually rewarded.

I think about that email when I am building a team. I think about it when I am writing a thank-you note. I think about it when someone on my watch is on the receiving end of a moment that is not okay and is too junior or too new or too uncertain to push back on it themselves.

The question I ask is simple. Is the person at the back of the room being protected, or being packaged?

If you have to ask, you already know the answer.

Here is the part nobody puts on a poster. I have not always gotten this right. There are moments I have looked back on with the gut-punch of recognition. Wish I had said it differently. Wish I had caught it sooner. The leadership of one human over another is a daily practice, not a finished product. It does not come with a trophy. It comes with a willingness to keep adjusting, and a trusted circle of seasoned women who will tell me when I have missed the mark. Everyone who leads needs that circle. Without it, you only hear the echo of your own voice.

That became the standard I carried forward. Now the work is helping other people build the same. Stronger teams. Better customer experiences. Cultures where the person at the back of the room is protected by design, not by accident. If your team is missing that, the first call is free.

Book your call here

I did not get on the plane.

Ted Turner offered me a seat on his private jet more than once. Some people would have taken it. Some would say it was the wrong call.

They miss the math. The trajectory was already in place. The jets I flew on were already part of the work. His were not the only ones in the sky.

Arm candy has never been the right job. That is not modesty. That is operational truth. The work since then has been about helping build companies and helping build teams. Sitting in rooms that mattered. Leading tours of my own where the people at the back of the room are protected, not packaged.

The plane would have been a story. The path I took became a life.

We have come a long way.

We are not done.

The number of women who have a version of that 2001 email sitting in their memory is too high to count.

The work is not just to call out the powerful man. The work is to be the senior woman who sends a different email. The colleague who does not laugh. The leader who notices who is at the back of the room and asks whether the culture is treating her like an asset or an accessory.

How you show up is the whole job.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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Her cover photo was the moment I knew we were not hiring her.

Naked. Folded over the back of a sofa with her arms draped along it. A man behind her, his hands placed just enough across her front to keep the post from being taken down. Stripper-grade staging dressed up as artistic license. The caption underneath, and I’m cleaning this up, was a defiant declaration that who she slept with and how was nobody’s business.

She had walked into our interview an hour earlier and nailed it. Warm. Articulate. Said all the right things about animals, about safety, about why she loved the work. On paper and in person, she was a yes.

Then we did what we always did. We pulled up her socials.

It was shocking. To be blunt.

Not because anyone cares what a grown woman does on her own time. Because this was the digital storefront she was using to apply for a job that would put her alone, overnight, inside our clients’ homes.

We did not hire her.

I thought about that interview this week when I read a note from Dr. Taylor Burrowes, who writes The Sweet Spot on Substack and brands herself, fittingly, as The Vetting and Compatibility Specialist.

Different industry. Identical pattern.

A young woman in Taylor’s local nanny group posted her hire-me pitch with sultry modeling photos. Taylor commented, kindly, that the photos were beautiful but not appropriate for childcare work. The applicant DM’d her threatening to have her removed from the group. Then a chorus of other aspiring nannies piled on. Wives were jealous. Husbands were predators. Common sense was bigotry. Half of them, it turned out, were moonlighting on OnlyFans.

Not one of them could hear the actual point.

Here is the actual point, and it cuts across every service industry that puts a stranger inside a client’s home.

How you present yourself is information. It is the first thing anyone considering trusting you with their pets, their children, their keys, or their property will see. And it is doing the talking before you ever open your mouth.

This is not about modesty. A woman can post whatever she wants on her own page. That is her right and nobody is taking it. Some of these applicants are young, broke, and imitating exactly what social media has rewarded their entire adult lives. The platform taught them this is how you get attention, and they learned the lesson well.

But attention is not the same as trust. The page itself is a pitch. Every public profile is a pitch. And if your pitch for a job inside someone’s home looks identical to your pitch for a paid subscriber site, you have not been wronged when clients pass. You have been understood.

Now let me be honest about my own record.

I spent years building and scaling a service business that put my team inside clients’ homes every day. We ran background checks. Not the twenty-nine-dollar online specials. The premium ones, marketed as FBI-grade, that cost us serious money per hire. We used e-verify. We pulled socials, we did multiple interviews, we trial-ran candidates before they ever saw a client home alone. I now coach other service business owners through the same decisions, and I tell every one of them the same thing I am about to tell you.

We still got it wrong sometimes.

We hired a woman who was magnificent on paper and in person. Calm, capable, the kind of presence that made you exhale. Her resume included a stretch as a K9 trainer for a local police department. The credentials were the kind most service owners would treat as a stamp of approval and move on. On an overnight pet sitting assignment in a client’s home, she drank a full bottle of vodka from their liquor cabinet. The client found out the way clients always find out. We rebuilt the relationship over the next two years. The hire was a closet alcoholic, and none of our systems caught it because none of our systems were built to catch what someone has not yet shown you.

A bad hire in this industry is not just a trust problem. It is a liability problem. It is an insurance claim, a license risk, a lawsuit waiting to find a plaintiff. The cost of getting this wrong scales fast.

Vetting is not a guarantee. It is a filter. It catches what it can catch and it misses what it misses, and the work of running a real business is what you build to handle the misses.

The single most powerful tool we ever introduced was a dress code.

No shorts. Leggings or capris were fine. A branded shirt with our company logo. Closed-toe athletic shoes, always. That was it.

It changed everything. It neutralized the question of what was appropriate before anyone had to ask it. It signaled to clients that a professional was walking through their door, not a stranger off the internet. It protected our team from being sized up the moment they arrived. It protected our clients from awkwardness they should not have to manage. And it protected the business from a thousand judgment calls about whether a particular outfit was too much.

I am a fan of school uniforms for the same reason. I have attended schools that required them and schools that did not. The uniform schools removed an entire layer of social pressure that the other schools quietly tolerated. Branded apparel does the same thing for a service business. It is a neutralizer. It takes a variable that can quietly sink you and removes it from the equation.

A dress code is a system. A social media review is a system. A trial run is a system. A clear written policy on what gets someone removed from your roster is a system. Every one of these is built before you need it, so that when you need it, the answer is already on the page.

The hires we regretted were not failures of judgment. They were failures of system. You do not outgrow the need for new systems. You earn them.

Before I grew a business in the pet world, my career put me in rooms with dignitaries, principals, and the staff who run alongside them. There is a saying that follows you everywhere in that world.

“We serve at the pleasure of the president.”

It is not a throwaway line. It is the operating philosophy. You are there because someone with the authority to choose has chosen you, and that choice can be revoked at any moment. Your job is to honor the trust while it is yours.

I drilled a version of that into our team for years. We serve at the pleasure of our clients.

They invite us into their homes. Sacred, inner, personal spaces. They hand us their keys, their alarm codes, their routines, and the animals they love most in the world. We become, briefly, an extension of their family. That is not a small thing. It is the thing.

You violate that trust in any way, by clothing, messaging, actions, presentation, presence, and you are not just costing yourself a client. You are reflecting on the entire team. This is not a you show. It is an us business. The privilege of being the primary caretaker for someone’s animals while they are away exists because we have earned the right to be there, and we keep earning it every single visit.

Build a team that understands this in their bones, and you will rarely need to chase business. Word of mouth in service industries does not move on advertising. It moves on the felt sense clients have when they walk back through their front door and everything is exactly as it should be.

That feeling is the product. Everything else is logistics.

This same standard applies to every person you bring into your business orbit. The bookkeeper. The virtual assistant. The contractor. The referral partner. The coach you are considering hiring.

Vet them the same way. Look at how they show up online. Look at how they handle disagreement. Look at the gap between the pitch deck and the public profile. The principle does not change because the title does.

And while you are at it, look at your own.

Pull up your own profile right now and ask what it is pitching. Not what you wish it pitched. Not what you remember posting last year. What does it say to a stranger, in the first three seconds, about whether you are someone to trust?

Good presentation in this industry is not complicated. Clean. Recognizably human. Evidence of competence and care. Photos of the work. Photos of you doing the work. Words that sound like a person who takes the work seriously.

That is the bar. It is not high. Most people clear it without thinking.

Vetting is not optional, and it is not cruel. It is the work. You are not a bad person for looking at someone’s public presentation, asking for references, or requiring a uniform. You are a responsible one.

And if you are the one being vetted, your presentation is the pitch. Your socials are the pitch. The way you respond to feedback is the pitch.

You do not get to opt out of being read. You only get to decide what you are giving people to read.

Always be vetting. Always be worth being vetted. And build the systems that catch what your eyes will miss.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

Prefer to read in the app without the inbox noise? You can switch to app-only notifications in your Substack account settings under Notifications. I want this to work for you however works best.

I owe you an apology, and I’m not going to give you one. I am still showing up. Sometimes weaker. Sometimes wiped out. But I always show up.

Part II ran nearly a month ago. Part III was supposed to follow within two weeks. Instead I got sick again, landed back in court navigating proceedings, and spent most of the last few weeks doing exactly what this series is about: navigating a system that has no answer for someone like me, while keeping my head above water, growing businesses, and managing a medical situation that does not stay still.

That is not a digression from the story. That is the story.

Every delay in this series is a receipt. Every missed deadline is what the gap costs a person in real time. I am not writing about healthcare from a policy desk. I am writing about it from inside it. Between migraines, impaired vision, antibiotics, and court hearings. My eight-month wait for the neuro-ophthalmologist came up this week. I had to put it on hold until my new expensive subpar HMO plan kicks in at the beginning of May.

Over the next month there will be a lot happening. A big day in court. An MRI and more imaging. Several medical appointments I can no longer defer.

So here we are. Part III. The rebuild.

Not a rant. A framework.

What I Promised You

In Part I, I laid out three paths that are actually on the table. Not the fake binary everyone argues about on cable news. The three real ones.

• Universal coverage — with all the wait lists that come with it.

• True market competition — eliminating state lines, letting companies compete for your business nationwide, and forcing the math to actually work.

• Eliminate the fraud and corruption — bleeding the system dry before anyone sees a dime of actual care.

I said all three were better than what we have now. I still believe that.

But after years of living this, running the numbers, and reading what every other country has actually tried, I am going to tell you a harder truth.

Half a lung removed. Every respiratory infection since is a potential emergency. Every imaging delay is a gamble. This is not an academic exercise for me. This is the environment I live in.

None of them works alone.

First, The Part Nobody Says Out Loud

Before we go anywhere else, one fact has to land first.

The United States has the best medical talent in the world. That is not a patriotic talking point. That is a global fact.

When a head of state, a foreign minister, or a Saudi prince needs a major procedure, they do not get on a plane to Toronto. They do not fly to London. They fly to Cleveland, Houston, Baltimore, Rochester, New York, DC, or Boston. Walk the halls of George Washington Hospital or Georgetown University Hospital in DC. Walk into the Cleveland Clinic. The Mayo Clinic. Mass General. Johns Hopkins. MD Anderson. You will hear ten languages before you reach the elevator. People fly across oceans to be treated here because the surgical expertise, the research, the equipment, and the outcomes in these hospitals are still unmatched anywhere on earth.

So when someone tells you “the American healthcare system is broken,” that statement needs a qualifier.

The care is not broken. The delivery, pricing, and access model around the care is broken.

Keep that distinction in mind for the rest of this piece. Because every reform conversation in this country goes off the rails within five minutes when someone conflates the two. The people who want to tear the whole system down and rebuild it on a Canadian or British model are not just attacking the billing structure. They are risking the part of American medicine that actually works. The part that saves people the rest of the world cannot save.

We do not need to replace our medical system. We need to replace the financial structure wrapped around it.

Now. The rest.

Universal Coverage Is Not What You Think It Is

People on one side of this argument talk about universal coverage like it solves the problem. It does not. It solves a different problem than the one I am living.

Canada has universal coverage. In 2025, the median wait time from GP referral to actual treatment across twelve specialties was 28.6 weeks. That is the second-longest wait ever recorded in the country’s history. Patients in New Brunswick waited over a year. Across the country, an estimated 1.4 million Canadians were sitting on a waitlist for a procedure.

The UK has universal coverage. The NHS has not met its own four-hour emergency room standard in over a decade. Its urgent cancer referral benchmark is 28 days. Its non-urgent specialist standard is measured in months.

And before anyone says “that’s other countries,” we already run universal systems inside the United States. Medicare. Medicaid. The VA.

The VA’s own published standard for specialty care is 28 days. After that, veterans are eligible to seek care in the community on the government’s dime. That standard exists precisely because the VA could not meet its own access goals for decades. In 2014, a Phoenix audit revealed over 1,700 patients had been placed on secret waitlists. Some died before being seen. That was not a foreign country. That was our universal system.

I already told you I waited months for a specialist in the United States on an urgent list. I am now at eight months, still waiting, paying private market premiums that consume a shocking percentage of my income. Nobody gets to tell me universal coverage would have saved me time. It would have saved me money. Those are not equivalent.

Universal coverage solves the bankruptcy question. It does not solve the access question.

When your head is throbbing and your doctor ordered the imaging and you cannot afford it, you do not care whether the bill is coming from a private insurer or a government program. You care whether you can get the scan.

Universal coverage answers the bill. It does not answer the scan.

So the people who argue that it is the single silver bullet are wrong. And the people who argue that it is communism are also wrong. It is a tool. It handles one specific problem very well. It does not handle the others.

What Everyone Else Actually Pays

Here is a side-by-side picture rarely shown clearly. What every major country spends per person on healthcare, what portion their government covers, and what their citizens actually get for that money.

Numbers below are current health expenditure per capita for 2024, sourced from OECD and WHO data.

The OECD average is approximately $5,000 per capita. The United States spends nearly three times the OECD average per person. Switzerland, the next highest spender, comes in 55% below us.

And here is the part that matters.

Life expectancy in the United States is the lowest of every country on that list.

We pay the most. We cover the fewest. We wait the longest for imaging many Americans cannot even afford. Our infant mortality is higher than every country in the table. Our maternal mortality is worse than every country in the table. Our rates of chronic disease are worse than every country in the table.

More spending does not buy better outcomes. It buys a larger billing apparatus.

Every country on that list solved a problem we have not. They built a financing structure that aligns what you pay with what you receive. They did not build a better medical system than ours. They built a better payment system around their medical system.

That distinction is the entire argument.

The Market Answer Was Already Legal. Nobody Used It.

This is the part nobody on either side wants to talk about.

When politicians campaign on “letting insurance compete across state lines,” they are selling you a solution that has already existed in federal law for more than a decade.

Section 1333 of the Affordable Care Act specifically authorizes interstate healthcare compacts. Two or more states can agree to let insurers licensed in one sell policies in the others. The mechanism exists. The legal framework exists. It has existed since 2014.

At least nine states have passed laws authorizing themselves to enter such a compact. Georgia. Maine. Kentucky. Rhode Island. Wyoming. Others.

Number of compacts that have actually formed: zero.

Number of policies ever sold across state lines through this mechanism: zero.

Read that again. For over a decade, states have had the legal authority to do what politicians keep promising they will fight to make legal. And none of them did it. Not a single one.

Why?

Because the economics do not work the way the slogan works. Insurance premiums are not primarily driven by state regulations. They are driven by local healthcare costs. When a hospital in Florida charges four times what a hospital in Iowa charges for the same procedure, an insurance company from Iowa cannot “sell cheap insurance in Florida” because the insurance company still has to pay the Florida hospital the Florida price.

What actually ends up happening under unrestricted interstate sales, according to every regulator who has studied it, is this. Insurance companies relocate to whichever state has the weakest consumer protections. They write policies that exclude the conditions that cost the most. They sell those policies into other states by marketing to healthy people. The healthy people save a little money. The sick people get priced out. The state-level consumer protections that took decades to build get hollowed out.

That is what the industry itself told CMS when asked for comment. Five major insurers said a new federal mechanism was unnecessary and that interstate sales would not meaningfully lower premiums. Consumer advocacy groups including the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association agreed, from the opposite direction.

So when you hear “we need to let insurance compete across state lines,” understand what is actually being proposed. It is not more competition. It is regulatory arbitrage. It is allowing companies to choose their regulator.

I know what that looks like because I watched banks do the identical move in the early 2000s. That did not end well.

Market competition is good. But competition in healthcare requires what we have not had in fifty years. Real price transparency. Hospitals publishing their actual costs. Providers competing on quality and outcomes, not on which billing code they can get away with. A market where the person paying the bill can see what they are paying for before the service is delivered.

Interstate sales without price transparency is not competition. It is a regulatory shell game.

So option two, by itself, also fails.

Now Let’s Talk About the Fraud. And the Real Number.

This is the option nobody wants to talk about because it implicates everyone.

In June of 2025, the Department of Justice announced the single largest healthcare fraud takedown in American history.

• 324 defendants charged.

• 96 of them licensed medical professionals: doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists.

• Over $14.6 billion in fraudulent billings in a single coordinated enforcement action.

• More than double the previous record.

Inside that takedown was an operation called Gold Rush. A transnational criminal organization bought dozens of medical supply companies across the United States using foreign straw owners. They then submitted $10.6 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims for urinary catheters and durable medical equipment.

The beneficiary identities on those claims were stolen from over one million Americans.

One. Million. Americans had their Medicare identities used in a single fraud scheme.

That is not waste. That is not abuse. That is organized theft on a scale most people cannot picture, from a program funded entirely by taxpayers, targeting the elderly and disabled specifically because they are the most vulnerable.

What We Prosecute. What We Estimate. What It Actually Is.

Since the DOJ’s Healthcare Fraud Strike Force launched in 2007, it has charged more than 6,200 defendants who collectively billed federal programs and private insurers over $45 billion.

That is the prosecuted fraud. The fraud that was caught, indicted, and resolved.

The estimated fraud is a different number entirely.

The Government Accountability Office reports that Medicare and Medicaid combined generated over $100 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2023. That was roughly 43 percent of the entire federal government’s improper payment total for the year. For fiscal year 2025, Medicare Fee-for-Service improper payments alone ran in the tens of billions. Medicaid improper payments that year ran $37.4 billion.

Now. CMS will correctly point out that “improper payments” is not the same as “fraud.” Most of those improper payments are classified as improper because of missing documentation, not because someone intentionally stole from the program. That distinction matters.

But the Senior Medicare Patrol, the federally-funded program dedicated to educating beneficiaries about fraud, estimates that Medicare alone loses roughly $60 billion per year to actual fraud, errors, and abuse.

Add Medicaid. Add private insurance fraud. Add the fraud that never gets flagged because the billing codes line up cleanly enough to pass an automated check.

Credible estimates for the total annual cost of healthcare fraud in the United States, across public and private payers combined, range from $100 billion to $300 billion per year.

Let that number sit.

What that actually means.

If the real number is $200 billion a year, right in the middle of the credible range, then over a decade, that is two trillion dollars stolen from American healthcare.

Two trillion dollars would fund universal catastrophic coverage for every uninsured American multiple times over. It would pay down the entirety of every red state’s Medicaid expansion concerns. It would fund the VA’s technology modernization, the CMS payment integrity overhaul, and real-time claims verification infrastructure with money left over.

That is the money that is missing. Not from a budget fight on the Hill. From theft. Some of it organized. Some of it opportunistic. All of it absorbed silently by a system that treats loss as a cost of doing business.

The fraud is not a rounding error. The fraud is roughly the size of the problem everyone keeps saying is unsolvable.

When you have a multi-trillion-dollar flow of money moving through a byzantine billing apparatus with no real-time oversight, and when the people who catch it catch it years after the money is gone, you have not built a healthcare system. You have built a laundering operation with a hospital attached.

CMS said it prevented another $4 billion in improper payments ahead of the 2025 takedown using AI-powered analytics. That is good. It is also the equivalent of installing a better lock on a building that has been robbed every day for twenty years.

You cannot fix premiums in a system that is bleeding this much money in fraud. You cannot fund universal anything in a system that cannot tell which claims are real. You cannot have market competition in a system where fake companies bill for services that never happened and collect real money before anyone notices.

Fix the fraud or nothing else matters. That is not hyperbole. That is math.

A Quick Word on Obamacare

Before I go further, one thing has to be said out loud, because the entire national conversation about healthcare is broken by people using these terms interchangeably when they are not the same thing.

Medicaid is not Obamacare.

Medicare is not Obamacare.

The VA is not Obamacare.

These are four different programs, with four different histories, serving four different populations. Confusing them is not a small mistake. It is the thing that makes this entire debate incoherent, and it benefits the people who prefer the confusion.

Medicare started in 1965. It is a federal program for Americans 65 and older, funded through payroll taxes. It predates Obama by 43 years.

Medicaid also started in 1965. It is a joint federal-state program for low-income Americans. It has existed for 60 years. The ACA expanded eligibility in participating states in 2014, but Medicaid itself was not created by Obamacare. People were on Medicaid for generations before.

The VA started in 1946. It is a separate federal system serving veterans, with its own hospitals and providers.

Obamacare, formally the Affordable Care Act, is primarily about the individual insurance market. The marketplace at healthcare.gov. The premium subsidies. The rules preventing denial for preexisting conditions. The essential benefit requirements. It is a set of rules and subsidies layered on top of private insurance for the people who do not have coverage through an employer or one of the programs above.

That distinction matters right now because of something I have been hearing a lot lately.

“Obamacare doesn’t seem so bad anymore.”

It is usually said by people who were on Medicaid for years and have recently aged off, earned too much to qualify, or had some other change in status drop them into the individual market for the first time in their adult lives. They thought they were on Obamacare the whole time. They were not. They were on Medicaid, a program that has existed since 1965, which gave them coverage at low or no cost relative to the individual market.

Now that they are in the actual individual market, the one that the ACA governs, they are seeing the real price of insurance in this country for the first time. And they are reacting accordingly.

They are not wrong to notice what the individual market looks like. It is brutal. The premiums are crushing. The deductibles are higher than most people’s savings. The networks are narrow. The process of getting a claim paid is a part-time job.

What those voices are missing is that the individual market has looked like this for a long time. Small business owners, contractors, self-employed professionals, independent workers. We have been living in it for over a decade. The ACA changed who could access coverage. It did not change what the coverage costs or what it feels like to use.

Obamacare did not break the individual market. It moved more people into a market that was already broken.

This is the part of the conversation where politics has to step back and math has to step forward. The financial structure of the ACA was never sustainable on its own. It required enhanced subsidies, expanded Medicaid, and constant federal backfill to paper over the underlying cost problem. When any one of those pillars moved, whether subsidies expiring, a state refusing expansion, or federal matching rates shifting, the cracks showed up fast.

The people just now entering the individual market are experiencing what Part I laid out in full. The 94% of income consumed by a premium. The three-month wait for imaging. The coverage that doesn’t actually cover you until you have paid thousands out of pocket.

Their reaction is real. Their math is accurate. The system is crushing them.

But the system was crushing the rest of us before they got here. That is not a political point. That is chronology.

When more people feel the weight, more people are finally motivated to fix it. That is the opportunity in the moment.

The Hybrid

So if none of the three options works alone, what does?

They have to be sequenced. And they have to be built in a specific order, because each step depends on the one before it.

First: Eliminate the fraud. Before anything else.

Not as an eventual goal. As a precondition for every other reform.

You cannot rebuild a system with this much money leaking out of it. The 2025 Fusion Center, real-time data analytics, the expansion of whistleblower rewards under FinCEN, the AI-powered detection. All of it is a start. But the start is not the finish. The finish is a healthcare payment system where every claim is verified before it is paid, not audited two years after the money is gone.

That is a technology problem. We have the technology. What we have not had is the political will.

Until that is fixed, every dollar you put into the system, public or private, is funding both care and the people stealing from care. You cannot separate them with policy. You have to separate them with enforcement.

Second: Mandate real price transparency.

Not the kind hospitals claim to have now with machine-readable files buried four pages deep on websites nobody can navigate. Real transparency. The procedure you need. The price it costs. The same price for everyone. Published. Publicly. Before the service is delivered.

Without this, market competition is a fiction. You cannot choose the cheaper option if you do not know what anything costs until the bill arrives. Right now, you do not get to be a consumer in healthcare. You get to be a patient. A patient signs forms, gets procedures, and finds out months later what it cost. A consumer sees the price before the purchase.

Until we are consumers, there is no market.

Third: Allow genuine interstate competition, within a federal regulatory floor.

This is where I disagree with the purists on both sides.

Unrestricted interstate sales is the race to the bottom the regulators warned about. But a federal regulatory floor combined with real interstate competition is a different proposition entirely. It lets insurers compete on price, network strength, and administrative efficiency. It keeps them from competing on how successfully they can exclude sick people from coverage.

The ACA tried to create this framework and nobody used it because the mechanism was structured poorly. Redesign it. Keep the essential benefit floor. Kill the state-by-state fragmentation. Let real national carriers emerge.

There are 36 million small businesses in America. 30 million of them are one person. Another 5 million have fewer than 100 employees. Together they create 9 out of every 10 net new jobs in this country and account for nearly half of all private sector employment.

Fourth: Let solopreneurs pool like employers do.

This is the piece I have been living and the piece my industry has been living for twenty plus years.

Small businesses with employees have their own version of this problem, and they need their own fix. This section is about the 30 million Americans who are the business and the workforce at the same time.

The labor market has changed. The old fix for this, reclassifying gig workers as W-2 employees, no longer matches reality. The hairstylist renting her own chair is not being exploited by a misclassified employer. She is her own business. So is the dog walker with an LLC. The handyman with a truck and three regular clients. The graphic designer with a Shopify site and a subscription to Adobe. The accountant running her practice from her kitchen table at 2 a.m.

They did not get tricked into self-employment. Most of them chose it. They want the flexibility. They want to own their book of business. They are not asking to go back to a corporate job.

What they are paying for that freedom is brutal. The individual insurance market charges a solopreneur roughly three times what the same coverage costs inside an employer group plan. That premium is not based on risk. It is based on pool size. A single person buying insurance has no leverage. A company with 500 employees has enormous leverage. The entire pricing difference comes down to whether you have a crowd to stand inside.

Here is the fix.

One national pool. Every self-employed American in one place.

Not fragmented by industry. Not fragmented by state. Not fragmented by guild membership or trade affiliation. One federally chartered pool that any self-employed American can buy into, on the same terms as any other member.

Thirty million self-employed Americans in a single pool is the largest, most diverse, and most stable risk configuration in the country. Larger than any Fortune 500 employer plan. Larger than most state Medicaid programs. A pool that size does not need industry-specific underwriting, because the numbers average out faster and more predictably at scale than they do in any smaller subset. The 25-year-old freelance designer and the 58-year-old independent consultant and the 42-year-old contractor and the 35-year-old yoga instructor all stand in the same crowd, and the crowd is big enough to price them fairly.

Verification is simple, and the technology to do it already exists.

Leverage a federal self-employment verification portal. Think of it as an E-Verify system for the self-employed. Upload your documentation. AI does the first pass, cross-referencing against IRS records, Secretary of State business filings, payment processor data, and insurance carrier databases. Verification returns in minutes, not months.

Any one of the following confirms eligibility:

• Prior-year tax filings showing Schedule C income, 1099 earnings, LLC distributions, or S-corp K-1s.

• Current pay records. Client invoices, ACH deposits, Stripe statements, Square reports, PayPal business records, platform-issued 1099-NECs from Uber, DoorDash, Rover, TaskRabbit, or similar.

• Active occupation-appropriate business insurance. Professional liability, general liability, errors and omissions, bonding. If you are running a real business, you are already carrying coverage your clients or landlord require.

None of this is theoretical. E-Verify has processed employment eligibility for 30 years. ID.me handles identity verification for the IRS, VA, and Social Security Administration every day. The federal government already uses AI-based document verification at scale across multiple agencies. The infrastructure is mature. The precedent is established. The only thing missing is the political decision to build it for self-employment.

This framework already exists in law. It is called an Association Health Plan, and it has existed under ERISA for decades. The last serious attempt to expand it happened in 2018, got tangled in court, and has been sitting in regulatory limbo ever since. Both parties have had reasons to keep it small. Neither party has had the political will to unlock it at the scale where it actually works.

Unlock it. Build the federal framework. Build the verification portal. Build the consumer protection floor. And then let the 30 million solopreneurs in this country do what every employer-based worker already does. Stand inside a crowd big enough to get a real price.

Here is what nobody in Washington says out loud.

We say we want to build up small business America. We say we want to encourage entrepreneurship. We put it on campaign posters. Politicians pose for photos in front of bakeries and print shops and mechanic’s garages every election cycle. And then they go back to Washington and leave the healthcare system exactly the way it is.

The harsh reality is that building a small business in this country today takes a level of toughness and grit that most people cannot imagine until they are in it. You will hustle in ways you never thought you would. You will find inner strength you did not know you had. You will carry weight that would break most people, and you will carry it while smiling at clients, paying vendors, making payroll, and pretending everything is fine.

I know. I lived it.

When I was building the pet services business, there were no investors. No fail safe. No runway. I was Ubering. Picking up subcontracted advance work. Taking whatever projects came my way. Building a pet services company including day and night work. Three jobs at once, all of them 1099, all of them real, all of them paying different pieces of the same rent in order to keep a roof over my head. Sleep was for later. Way later.

That is how a seven-figure business that eventually employed dozens of people got started. Not with a funding round. With three 1099s and a refusal to stop.

And through all of it, the health insurance premium was the line item that nearly broke me every single month.

Worth naming while we are here. The gig platforms. Uber. DoorDash. Instacart. Thumbtack. Angi. TaskRabbit. Rover. Handy. Their entire business model depends on classifying workers as 1099 contractors instead of W-2 employees, which saves the platforms roughly 30 percent of what they would otherwise pay in employer-side benefits. Health insurance. Payroll taxes. Workers’ comp. Unemployment. That is not a business model innovation. That is an arbitrage on the backs of the workers. Those platforms have collectively generated hundreds of billions in revenue and tens of billions in profit by routing work to people the platforms refuse to insure. That contribution gap is a separate fight worth having, and that fight is coming in a piece of its own. For now, it is enough to name the pattern. The platforms built the gap. Fixing it is going to require making them help pay for what they stopped contributing when they classified everyone as a contractor.

That is what we are doing to the people we claim to want to encourage. We are telling them we love small business while charging them three times what a cubicle worker pays for the exact same coverage. We are telling them entrepreneurship is the American dream while making the cost of being sick as an entrepreneur financially catastrophic. We are stifling small business America by refusing to fix the one burdensome line item that follows every small business owner from year one through year twenty.

If we actually wanted more small businesses, more entrepreneurs, more builders, we would fix this. The fact that we have not, for five decades, tells you what the people writing the rules actually want.

I would have paid into a national self-employed pool in year one. So would every solopreneur I know. We were never asking for a handout. We were asking for the same pool access that a cubicle worker gets by accident of employment at a large company.

This is not a small fix. It is the single biggest structural change that would help the people who actually built this economy over the last fifteen years. They are not asking for charity. They are asking for fair math.

That is a reasonable ask. And it is already halfway written into federal law.

Fifth: Give the self-employed what Congress already has.

This is the piece that ties the rest of the framework together. And it is simpler than most people realize.

Members of Congress have it. Every federal employee has it. It has been running since 1960. It works. Extend it to the population the system forgot.

It is called the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. FEHBP. And if you have not heard of it, that is not an accident.

Here is how it actually works. Every federal employee, from a mail carrier to a cabinet secretary, can choose from a menu of plans offered by private insurance carriers. Blue Cross Blue Shield. Kaiser. GEHA. Aetna. The employee pays roughly 25 to 28 percent of the premium out of their paycheck. Taxpayers cover the remaining 72 to 75 percent. The plans are comprehensive. The networks are real. The coverage does not vary by age or health status. Preexisting conditions are irrelevant. Retirees keep their coverage for life if they have been enrolled for at least five years.

FEHBP is why a member of Congress earning $174,000 pays roughly $365 a month for Platinum-level coverage, while the 63-year-old self-employed woman in Florida I wrote about in Part I was quoted $4,923 a month for equivalent coverage. Same country. Same healthcare market. Two completely different pricing structures.

Here is the fix.

Open FEHBP to every self-employed American, every independent contractor, and every gig worker in the country.

Not a replacement for employer insurance. Not a replacement for Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA. An additional track, specifically for the 30 million Americans the current system was never designed to serve.

The private chef booking her own clients. The hairstylist with her own chair. The dog walker with an LLC. The contractor with a truck. The graphic designer with a Shopify site. The consultant running her practice from her kitchen table. The Uber driver, the DoorDash courier, the Rover walker, the TaskRabbit worker. The writer, the therapist, the personal trainer, the real estate agent, the wedding photographer, the bookkeeper, the house cleaner, the handyman, the pet professional, the freelance developer, the plumber running his own shop, the electrician with two employees.

All of them, buying into FEHBP at the same subsidized rate a federal employee pays. Same carriers. Same networks. Same age-neutral, health-status-neutral pricing.

That 63-year-old in Florida goes from $4,923 a month to roughly $365 a month. Same coverage. Same access. Same protection. The only thing that changes is her eligibility.

How this actually pays for itself.

This is where the framework clicks together.

The expansion is funded by the fraud enforcement in Step One. The $200 billion a year in healthcare fraud I walked through earlier is not a theoretical number. It is money already flowing through the system, being stolen in real time. Reclaim a fraction of it. Redirect it to fund the FEHBP subsidy for the expansion population. The math works because the money already exists. It is just currently being captured by bad actors instead of being deployed for the Americans who fund the system with their taxes.

You cannot build this fix in a system that is hemorrhaging fraud. You can build it in a system that has closed the leak. That is why sequence matters.

Verification is already solved.

The portal I described in Step Four handles enrollment. Upload your documentation. AI cross-references against IRS records, payment processor data, and insurance carrier databases. Verification returns in minutes. Schedule C filers, 1099 recipients, LLC owners, S-corp filers, gig platform workers, and active business insurance holders all qualify.

No guild membership required. No industry association. No federal bureaucracy to navigate. Just proof you are self-employed. The federal government already has most of the data. The applicant provides the rest.

What this does not disrupt.

Big corporate keeps its employer-sponsored plans. Nothing changes for the 160 million Americans who get coverage through their job. Their plans stay. Their premiums stay. Their employer contributions stay. If anything, employers benefit, because their contractors, vendors, and freelance collaborators stop leaving projects halfway through due to medical crises.

Medicare stays for seniors. Medicaid stays for low-income Americans. The VA stays for veterans. Tricare stays for military families. The Indian Health Service stays. CHIP stays. Nothing is taken from anyone.

One population gets something they have never had. That is the entire change.

Why this has not already happened.

FEHBP expansion has been proposed by both parties for five decades. Nixon proposed a version in 1974. Ted Kennedy introduced FEHBP-for-all legislation repeatedly. Elizabeth Warren proposed it in 2017. Chris Van Hollen proposed a version in 2019. None of them passed.

The opposition comes from a specific coalition. Individual market insurance brokers, who would lose their commission base. Short-term medical plan carriers, who sell the cheap, limited coverage that FEHBP would outcompete. Pharmacy benefit managers, who profit from the billing opacity that FEHBP would eliminate. A small group of concentrated interests that benefit from the current dysfunction.

The coalition that would benefit is enormous but disorganized. Thirty million self-employed Americans, the small businesses they run, the contractors they hire, the creative economy they power, the gig workforce that keeps the country moving, and every family member connected to them. But these people do not have lobbyists. They do not have a Washington office. They do not have a seat at the table when the legislation gets written.

That is why this fix has been available for 50 years and has not happened.

It is also why this is the fix that is most likely to happen next, if the pressure gets loud enough. Because the opposition is small and self-interested, the beneficiary group is huge, and the infrastructure already exists. There is nothing to build. There is only a door to open.

What gets closed when this opens.

The healthcare penalty on entrepreneurship ends. People who have been afraid to leave a corporate job can start the business they have been dreaming about. The job-lock that suppresses new business formation by roughly 25 percent gets released. The creative class stops being one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

The age penalty ends. FEHBP does not charge a 63-year-old three times what it charges a 23-year-old. Same coverage, same pricing, regardless of age.

The preexisting condition penalty ends. FEHBP does not underwrite individual risk. Everyone in the pool gets the same access.

The geographic penalty ends. A freelance designer in rural Idaho gets the same FEHBP access as one in San Francisco. Same networks. Same carriers.

The “hope you don’t get sick” penalty ends. Self-employed Americans stop making coverage decisions based on praying nothing happens. They start making coverage decisions based on what actually fits their lives.

The argument that ends the debate.

Members of Congress have FEHBP. They have had it for 65 years. They protect it fiercely. They have voted down every attempt to expand it to the rest of the country while keeping it for themselves.

Every member of Congress who votes against extending FEHBP to the 30 million self-employed Americans who fund the government with their taxes is on record voting to keep a premium benefit for themselves that they will not share with the people who pay for it.

That is not a policy disagreement. That is a two-tier citizenship argument. And once it is named clearly, it does not survive scrutiny.

Give the self-employed what Congress already has. The system is already built. The only thing missing is the will to open the door.

What’s Actually Already in Motion

Here is what is worth sitting with.

The fraud enforcement is already happening. The DOJ numbers are real. The Fusion Center is real. The whistleblower rewards are real. There is political will right now to act meaningfully on one leg of this three-legged problem.

The price transparency rules are already on the books. They are just not being enforced with teeth.

The ACA already contains the interstate compact mechanism. It just was not designed well enough to be used.

Almost everything in the framework I just laid out is either already legal, already authorized, or already underway. What is missing is coordination. Sequencing. The political honesty to tell the country that no single reform is going to fix this and that the ones that work have to be done in the right order.

That is not a policy problem. That is a leadership problem.

Why This Matters

I started this series because of a friend who picked up the phone to say goodbye. I wrote about him in Part I. He is the reason this series exists. He is the face of who the rebuild has to serve.

Not the lobbyists. Not the insurance executives. Not the pharmaceutical CEOs. Not the members of Congress whose healthcare my taxes already pay for.

Him. And everyone like him.

The bartenders who served you dinner last night. The dog walker who took care of your pet this morning. The contractor who fixed your roof last year. The consultant who built your website. The small business owner who employed twelve people through the pandemic and still cannot afford her own health insurance.

The middle. The people who actually keep this country running.

They deserve a system that works. And the reason it does not work is not because the problem is unsolvable. It is because the people in charge of solving it benefit from it being broken.

That is the real gap.

It is not a gap between what we have and what is possible. It is a gap between the people making the rules and the people living under them.

Close that gap and everything else gets easier.

What You Can Do Right Now

Same playbook as Part I and Part II. It still works. It always will.

Run your own numbers. Go to stridehealth.com. Enter your real information. No subsidies. Screenshot what comes back. Then enter 20001, Capitol Hill, and screenshot that. Post both.

Look up your representative at OpenSecrets.org. See who is funding them. Compare that to how they voted on healthcare. The picture tells itself.

Call them. Not email. Call. Congressional offices track call volume. It registers in a way emails do not. Tell them you have been paying attention. Tell them you will continue paying attention.

Vote in every election. The people deciding this are not personally exposed to the consequences. They need to hear from the people who are.

Talk about what you pay. The silence around healthcare costs is part of what keeps the system in place. The moment people start saying the actual numbers out loud, the argument changes.

Share this series. Part I. Part II. Part III. All three. The people in your life who need to read this will not find it on their own.

The system is not broken.

It is working exactly as designed.

The only question left is whether we are willing to change who it works for.

If this landed, share it. Share Part I. Share Part II. Share all three. The people in your life who need to read this won’t find it on their own. Forward it. Post it. Drop it in a group chat.

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Sources:

American medical excellence & global dignitary care:

• US News & World Report and Newsweek “World’s Best Hospitals” rankings: Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts General, NYU Langone consistently top international lists

• Foreign dignitaries and heads of state seeking care at US academic medical centers: widely documented across major medical institutions

Healthcare spending by country:

• US per capita health spending $14,885 (2024): OECD Health Statistics via Health Systems Facts, February 2026

• OECD average $5,000 per capita, US 2.5x average: OECD Society at a Glance 2024

• Country-by-country spending, coverage, and government share data: OECD Health at a Glance 2023/2025, WHO Global Spending on Health 2024, World Bank

• US spends nearly 40% more of GDP than second-place Germany, lowest life expectancy in G7: Economics by Design, February 2026

Fraud enforcement:

• 2025 National Health Care Fraud Takedown: 324 defendants, $14.6 billion: U.S. Department of Justice, June 30, 2025

• Operation Gold Rush: $10.6 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims, one million stolen beneficiary identities: DOJ Press Release, June 2025

• Healthcare Fraud Strike Force cumulative: 6,200+ defendants, $45 billion billed since 2007: Skilled Care Journal, 2026

• CMS prevented $4 billion ahead of 2025 Takedown: Medical Economics, 2026

• DOJ Health Care Fraud Unit $106.76 ROI per $1 spent: Mintz DOJ Year in Review, February 2026

Fraud estimates vs. improper payments:

• Over $100 billion in combined Medicare/Medicaid improper payments FY 2023 (43% of all federal improper payments): GAO-24-107487, April 2024

• Medicaid improper payments FY 2025: $37.4 billion (6.12%): CMS Improper Payments Fact Sheet, January 2026

• Medicare estimated $60 billion/year lost to fraud, errors, abuse: Senior Medicare Patrol

• Medicaid improper payments ten-year total $543 billion (CMS) vs. estimated $1.1 trillion (Paragon Institute): CMS Agency Financial Reports; Paragon Health Institute, March 2025

• KFF explainer on distinguishing fraud, waste, abuse, and improper payments: KFF, March 2025

Interstate insurance sales:

• ACA Section 1333 interstate compacts authorized since 2014: Federal Register, March 2019

• Nine states enacted Interstate Health Compact laws; zero compacts formed: Urban Institute

• No insurer has sold a policy through any interstate compact mechanism: Georgetown Center on Health Insurance Reforms

• Industry and regulator opposition to unrestricted interstate sales: NAIC, American Academy of Actuaries

• McCarran-Ferguson Act 1945: SAN.com, December 2025

Universal coverage wait times:

• Canada median wait 28.6 weeks, 1.4 million waiting: Fraser Institute, Waiting Your Turn 2025

• NHS wait time standards: NHS England, March 2026

• Cross-country specialist wait comparison: World Population Review, 2026

VA system:

• VA 28-day specialty care access standard: VA.gov Community Care Eligibility

• Phoenix VA secret waitlist scandal: Mission Roll Call, 2025

• GAO report on VA wait disparities: GAO-25-108101, February 2025

Referenced in Part I and Part II:

• Insurance industry lobbying spend $183 million in 2024: OpenSecrets.org

• Congressional health insurance taxpayer subsidy 72–75%: OPM, Congress.gov

• Pharma/health industry donations: $26.4M Democrats, $16.1M Republicans 2024: OpenSecrets

• Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY) pharma/health donations: OpenSecrets via Kentucky Lantern, October 2025

• One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed July 4, 2025: Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, July 2025

This is Part III of The Gap, a three-part series on what it costs to be in the middle in America right now.

Share The Jenn Files

You are holding a supercomputer.

It connects to the internet. It can act as storage and also access your files, your photos, your passwords, your music in the cloud. It runs AI programs. It accesses your email, your calendar, your entire life. It can translate languages in real time, navigate you across a continent, and process a payment before the other person puts their wallet away.

It is the single most powerful communication device ever built.

And its first function, the thing it was designed to do before any of the rest of it existed, is let one human being dial another human being and talk.

That function is dying.

Fifty-seven percent of small business owners say their number one challenge is reaching customers and growing sales. Not inflation. Not hiring. Not access to capital. Reaching people. With the supercomputer in their pocket.

There is a consultant who charges $480 an hour to teach professionals how to make a phone call. Not negotiate. Not cold pitch. Not handle objections. How to make a call. She role-plays it with them. She walks them through the anxiety of dialing a number and waiting for someone to pick up.

Think about what that means.

Her clients are not teenagers. Millennials are in their late 20s to mid-40s. Established professionals. People managing teams, handling budgets, sitting across the table from clients. And they are paying someone $480 an hour to coach them through the act of dialing a number.

There is a market for that coaching. A thriving one. Which means the problem is bigger than one consultant can solve at $480 an hour.

We built a supercomputer and turned it into an avoidance machine.

The numbers tell you what’s happening. Eighty-one percent of millennials report anxiety before making a phone call. Fifty percent of Gen Z and millennials are uncomfortable making business calls.

Two numbers. That’s all you need.

What they mean is this: a generation that has never had to be uncomfortable in real time built a professional life around every tool that lets them stay that way. Email. Text. Slack. DMs. Forms. All of them buffer you from the moment someone might say something unexpected and you have to respond without a delete key.

This is avoidance wearing the costume of efficiency.

And the businesses run by people who won’t pick up the phone are the businesses not growing.

I watched it detonate in my own company.

I had a team member at my pet care business who had been with us for several months. Solid. Dependable. We had watched her work, built trust with her, and decided she was ready for the next level. Training new hires. This was her first person to bring on. A milestone for her, and for us.

The setup was simple. We coordinated the plan together. She knew exactly what was expected, agreed to it, and said nothing to the contrary. The new hire had cleared our hiring process, which included an extensive background check. She drove herself to a neutral meeting spot, parked her car, and waited to jump in with our team member for the rest of the day’s shifts. Easy. Low stakes. Done a hundred times.

Our team member never showed up. No call. No text. No message of any kind. The new hire stood in a parking lot on her first day of work, waiting for someone who wasn’t coming.

When I finally got to the bottom of it and confronted our team member, her explanation was that she didn’t feel safe picking up someone she didn’t know.

She had agreed to the plan. She had said nothing. And then she chose to leave a vetted, hired new team member standing alone in a parking lot rather than pick up the phone and say so.

She couldn’t send a text. Couldn’t let me solve it before it became a crisis. She chose silence. And that silence was the answer, about who she was, and what that trust had actually been worth.

This was not a teenager. This was a person in her late twenties.

She eventually quit via text message.

Here in South Florida, it has its own particular texture.

You meet someone. A contractor. A vendor. A service provider. They may or may not shake your hand. But they tell you the estimate will be there by Thursday. And then nothing. You follow up. Nothing. You call. Nothing. They are alive and professionally invisible.

This is business ghosting. And in South Florida, it is a way of life.

Part of it is the same avoidance that exists everywhere. People would rather vanish than have an uncomfortable conversation about a timeline, a price, a problem they didn’t anticipate. Saying no requires a phone call. A phone call requires presence. So they smile and disappear instead.

But there is another layer here that nobody wants to say out loud.

South Florida has one of the largest non-English-speaking populations in the country. And what I have watched, repeatedly, is people nod along in a conversation they don’t fully understand and then go silent, because the follow-through would require a level of English they haven’t built.

I had a construction crew come through. Music blasting. Mess everywhere. Nobody picking up after themselves. When I raised it with the foreman, his English was limited enough that the conversation was difficult. His explanation for why no one on his crew had learned the language was simple: no time.

No time. From the crew that had plenty of time to blast music and leave their mess for someone else to clean up.

That is not a language barrier. That is a priorities problem.

My mother is a post-war Swedish immigrant. English was not her first language. She came to this country with nothing familiar around her. Not the language, not the customs, not the food, not the street signs. She learned. She assimilated. She built a life in a country that wasn’t speaking her native tongue, because that is what you do when you choose to be somewhere.

I have met people in South Florida who have been here for ten years and still cannot hold a basic conversation in English. Ten years. There is no excuse for that. Not in a country where the resources to learn are everywhere, where the language is on every screen, every sign, every interaction.

When you nod along and then disappear, you are not protecting yourself. You are failing the person across from you. And you are making the same choice my employee made, the same choice the generation being coached at $480 an hour makes every day. Silence over the discomfort of showing up.

The cost is always paid by someone else.

Here is where I am right now.

I am in conversations with a law firm about taking on my case. Professionals. People who are paid to represent serious interests in serious matters. And getting a callback during the intake process has become an exercise in patience I did not know I had.

I understand busy. I have run seven and eight figure operations. I know what it looks like when calls stack up and the day gets away from you. But there is a difference between busy and absent. Between delayed and disappeared.

Your reputation is not built on your credentials. It is not built on your website or your case results or your LinkedIn recommendations. It is built on whether people can reach you. How you respond when you are busy, overwhelmed, and stretched thin tells people exactly who you are. It tells them whether you respect their time. Whether you value the relationship. Whether you are someone worth trusting with something that matters.

Silence is not neutral. It sends a message. And the message is never what you think it is.

When you don’t call back, you don’t just lose that client. You lose the referral they would have sent. The review they would have written. The five people they would have told. Trust compounds in both directions. When you earn it and when you destroy it.

People with means are opting out entirely. I know people who fly their crews in now. Not because local talent doesn’t exist. Because they got tired of chasing callbacks, following up on estimates that never came, and standing in the gap that silence left. When unreliability becomes the norm, the market finds a way around it. And the people left behind are the ones who thought ghosting was a viable business strategy.

One missing call is not an isolated event. It is a signal. And in the age of reviews and screenshots and group chats, people share that signal faster than you can recover from it.

There is a question every client, every customer, every potential partner is asking about you, whether they know it or not. It is not whether you are qualified. It is not whether your prices are competitive. It is whether you are someone they want in their foxhole. Whether when things get hard, when the pressure is on, when it matters most, you show up. You answer. You call back.

The phone tells them the answer before you ever get the chance to.

The businesses I have watched actually build something real share a thread. Not the best product. Not the biggest ad budget. Not the most sophisticated funnel.

They talk to people. On purpose. Without waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect script.

They pick up the phone when it rings. They call back the same day. They have uncomfortable conversations instead of going quiet. They hire people who can do the same and hold the line when those people can’t.

If you are building a team, test for communication before you hire. If someone cannot hold a direct, confident conversation with you in the interview, it does not get better once they are on payroll. It gets worse. The person who can’t make a call becomes the person who leaves a new hire standing in a parking lot with no idea what happened.

And if you are the one quietly preferring the text, the email, the form, I am talking to you. Do the uncomfortable thing. Make the call. Not because it is easy. Because it works. Because there is no algorithm that replicates the warmth of a human voice, and there is no email thread that builds the kind of trust a ten-minute conversation can.

The businesses struggling to reach customers are not struggling because the customers aren’t there.

They are struggling because they are trying to build relationships through a screen, at arm’s length, with copy that sounds exactly like everyone else’s copy.

The phone cuts through all of it.

It always has.

You are holding a supercomputer.

The first thing it was built to do, before the apps, before the cloud, before the AI, before any of it, was connect you to another human being.

Use it for that.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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Sources:

57% of small business owners cite reaching customers and growing sales as their top challenge U.S. Chamber of Commerce / MetLife Small Business Index, 2024-2025 https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-weekly-forecast

81% of millennials report anxiety before making a phone call BankMyCell survey, cited across multiple publications including LinkedIn and industry HR sources

50% of Gen Z and millennials are uncomfortable making business calls Robert Walters recruitment study, 2024 https://www.robertwalters.be/insights/hiring-advice/blog/Phone-anxiety.html

The Phone Lady / $480 an hour coaching Referenced in Business Insider and cited in a LinkedIn industry analysis on phone phobia among millennials

Bye Buddy

My colleague and friend, Molly Cogan, wrote a tribute yesterday about our beloved friend who passed away on Monday.

I want to add to it.

Molly and I met on the road. That’s how a lot of us found each other. Thrown together by campaigns, policy tours, events that required everything you had and then a little more. Johnny Williams was the constant in a lot of those miles. The person who showed up, handled it, and made the impossible feel manageable.

For those who didn’t have the privilege — Johnny owned and operated a bus transport company. What started as a single leap of faith in the 80s grew into a full fleet operation. He saw something the industry hadn’t caught up to yet: that campaigns and major tours needed the ability to move fluidly from community to community, and a bus was the most powerful way to do it.

He built the model. Then he kept building.

At the prime of some of those campaigns and tours, we could effectively hit eight to twelve cities in a single day. I think our record was 15. Those are 15 full events with sound, staging, lighting, dignitaries, movements, local city involvement, and a full program all wrapped up with a press avail. Multiple buses running simultaneously around the country. Multiple teams. A tour director. Dignitaries moving by plane, train, and automobile between stops.

And before any of it could happen, advance teams had driven every route by hand. We are talking hotel computers to print maps. Driving every turn, every underpass, every airport approach ourselves to confirm the bus could get through. No GPS. No apps. A Blackberry if you were lucky, and we were thrilled the day they introduced a color screen. You knew that route because you had physically been on it. There was no other way.

We needed a full 13’6” of clearance. Anything at or less would not get us through. I see you, Norfolk Airport.

The buses weren’t just transportation. They were wrapped full coverage, the campaign messaging built right into the visual. Every stop, every roadside press avail, every pop-up moment was backed by a backdrop that worked and was multifunctional. What looked to the outside world like people just riding a bus was actually a micro-managed, minute-by-minute operation that accounted for every possible detail and then some.

And as the operation evolved, Johnny evolved with it. Faster than most. When the press vans that followed us needed to file stories on deadline, Johnny figured out how to get WiFi on the bus so they could tap in and transmit from the road. Nobody asked him to solve that problem. He just saw the need and built the solution. That was always Johnny. Watching what the people around him required and finding a way to deliver it before they knew to ask.

The glue holding all of it together was Johnny Williams.

Here’s what most people never see about operations at that level. I was on one movement that was very high profile. The images from the event were to be used for additional materials.

FLOTUS was en route. Less than thirty minutes out. The bus had already been cleared by Secret Service, wrapped, positioned, locked in as the visual backdrop for the press avail. A bomb-sniffing dog came through doing a final sweep.

The dog signaled. On the bus.

Everyone froze. Because when a dog signals a possible threat, there is no explanation that satisfies. It did not matter that a volunteer from the church where the city event was being held had innocently grabbed a bottle of 409 and wiped down the steps trying to be helpful. It did not matter that 409 is a known trigger for bomb-sniffing dogs. The protocol does not negotiate.

The bus had to move. Which meant tearing down an entire side of staging with less than thirty minutes on the clock.

Johnny didn’t panic. We all handled it together.

That’s what trust looks like in a high-stakes environment. Not a policy or a process. A person you know, without question, has your back. And knows you have his.

Not every story from the road is that heavy. Some of them are just ridiculous.

We were running lean on a campaign stop at one of the oldest ice cream shops in the Midwest. Rolling fields, small town, the kind of place that’s been there longer than anyone can remember. The plan was to leapfrog ahead of the motorcade by about ten to fifteen minutes, get everything set, and be ready when the bus arrived.

I was flying down country roads when I zoomed past a red Chevy Blazer. Unmarked. Small town police officer.

He pulled me over.

So there I am, talking into my radio to my colleague on the bus to ask Johnny to slow down without making it obvious to anyone in order to buy me time, while simultaneously telling the officer to please just write the ticket. Quickly. Because I have a motorcade a few minutes behind me and I need to be at the next stop before they arrive.

The look on his face.

I made it. Just barely. But that’s the road. You solve the problem in front of you and you keep moving. Every single time.

There was another moment I’ve never forgotten. We were on the road, and things were not going well. The kind of not-well that makes everyone tense and short and looking for somewhere to put it.

Brenda, Johnny’s wife, who traveled with him at various intervals, didn’t get frustrated. She gathered us. Johnny, Brenda, a small handful of us, standing in a circle, holding hands, praying over the events and everyone involved.

I think about that moment a lot. The chaos outside. The stillness inside that circle on the bus.

That is the Williams family.

Johnny had a huge heart. He worked hard for candidates and causes he believed in, across decades of this country’s history. He loved Brenda and his kids and grandkids fiercely, and he would tell you so.

He built something real. He saw a gap before anyone else did, took the leap, and then spent decades refining the operation as the world changed around him. He didn’t wait for the industry to catch up. He stayed ahead of it.

That’s the thing about people who build from nothing. They don’t stop at the idea. They stay in the execution, all the way through, for as long as it takes.

Every time we wrapped an event and said our goodbyes, he had one line.

Bye Buddy.

So that’s what I’ll say.

Bye for now, Johnny. Thanks Buddy.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, and resilience — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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Six years ago, I wrote this.

April 6, 2020. Nobody knew what April 7 would look like. Nobody knew the DC area wouldn’t reopen until the following year. Nobody knew that words like grit and resilience were about to get redefined. That we’d find out what they actually mean when there’s no timeline, no roadmap, and no guarantee there’s another side.

What I knew on April 6th: I was running a significant business, and within three weeks, we watched our monthly revenue drop to below $10,000.

Do that math. Payroll. Insurance. Vehicles. Equipment. Rent. Ten thousand dollars doesn’t come close to covering it. And we had no idea how long we’d be sitting there.

Just weeks before, Google had been out for a full day of filming. Cameras, crew, a documentary on female entrepreneurs building something. I was one of them. And then the world stopped. Not slowed. Stopped.

Reporters started calling. They wanted the collapse story. The business owner who couldn’t hold on. I wouldn’t give it to them. Not because things weren’t brutal, but because brutal and finished are not the same thing. I’d spent years building something that could take a hit. I wasn’t going to let someone else write the ending.

What that entire chapter taught me, and what I keep coming back to every time the ground shifts again, is that your ability to navigate anything comes down to one thing. Not strategy. Not capital. Not connections.

How you choose to respond.

The article below is exactly what I wrote in the middle of it. Not looking back. Not knowing how it ended. I’m sharing it again because the world has a way of cycling. New pressure, new uncertainty, new reasons to spiral. And every time it does, I think about what my dear friend Keith Harrell always said.

Attitude is everything.

He meant every word. So do I.

Is the media driving a message of doom and gloom?

Interesting experience. Over the past several days, I have been interviewed regarding business and the impact of COVID-19. In one interview specifically, I was repeatedly asked for a “negative” sound bite and what the reporter was attempting to get me to say was a message of doom and gloom. Our business is failing, we’ve let most everyone go, we don’t see any hope... NOTE: I didn’t give her what she wanted and subsequently was not even mentioned in the interview.

DON’T BELIEVE ALL OF WHAT THE MEDIA IS TELLING YOU!

Are we struggling??!! - Of course. EVERYONE is being impacted by the pandemic. There is no such thing as a nonessential person and we are all shouldering and navigating this current situation.

This is also the time to get lean and mean as well as get smarter. Do you have a crisis plan in place? If not, get one! We have regrouped, transitioned many of our services, giving options to others for alternative types of activities for their furry companions that still adhere to social distancing protocols as well as help the pet parent provide for a safe and fun experience for their dog.

NOTE: Pet Parents - being at home constantly with your pets is not necessarily a good thing. Your pets need to get out and EXERCISE! Being constantly at home is setting you and your pet up for possible behavioral issues when all of this comes to an end. Exercise, Engagement, and Socialization (with other dogs) are the keys!

So, here is what I shared with the Reporter that she found was not acceptable to the story she was portraying.

• We are down currently about 80% in monthly volume.

• Our team has all been given the option to remove themselves if needed.

• We are volunteering at the Humane Rescue Alliance on Mondays providing adventures! Guess what - just because a pandemic is going on doesn’t mean that the many pets in shelters don’t need exercise. In fact, they need volunteers even more!

• Tuesdays through Fridays, we are providing limited services focused on our Adventures - exercising dogs out in nature while social distancing.

• All days we are providing heavily discounted services to those serving on the front lines.

Finally, WE ARE HIRING! We need people who love dogs! There are many pets to exercise and there is a safe and secure manner in which to do this while observing all protocols and mandates set forth.

I challenged the reporter and kept circling back that while we are down, we will survive and our goal is to maintain a positive attitude, look for additional ways to give back, and ensure our team members are able to stay afloat. This is not easy by any stretch, but as my dear friend, Keith Harrel used to always say, “Attitude is Everything!”

Oracle let 30,000 people go. Via email.

Times are hard for a lot of people right now. The pressure is different than 2020, but the question is the same. What do you do when the ground moves?

Here’s what I know: you have an idea. The world needs your idea. Go build it.

If you need a starting place, reach out. I’d love to help.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, and resilience — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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I’ve been sitting with a story this week that I can’t shake. Dr. Karen Becker’s mom wrote about a little black-and-white stray cat named Max. The kind of cat who shows up in your backyard like he owns the place, earns your trust inch by inch over months, and then finally lets you love him completely.

Max didn’t eat poison. He hunted. He caught a mouse. That mouse had eaten rodenticide.

Max is gone.

Secondary poisoning. When a rodent consumes bait and then is eaten by a predator before dying, the toxins transfer. The cat didn’t touch the bait. The cat just did what cats do. And died from someone else’s solution to someone else’s problem.

Dr. Karen Becker, widely considered the most well-known integrative veterinarian in the world, didn’t live with Max, but she has seen this more times than anyone should. She put it plainly: these poisons ripple through entire ecosystems, harming the very predators that naturally control rodent populations and unintentionally putting our pets at risk. She’s right. And she’s not alone in saying it.

Max’s story isn’t rare. It’s just rarely connected.

I’ve spent time living in various parts of the world. Africa, South America, Central America, in places where the infrastructure is raw and the risks are visible. We used to joke about the asbestos in the roof. On one stretch of months living in Africa, we boiled the water. That was simply how you got clean water. You knew it wasn’t safe, so you treated it accordingly. That habit of questioning everything, what’s in the water, what’s in the air, what’s in the walls, doesn’t leave you.

Fast forward to a mass on my lung, and the joke stops being funny. I wonder about it. I can’t prove anything. But I’ve spent enough time in enough places to know that what surrounds you finds a way in.

Here’s what nobody tells you when you come home to the USA: you don’t reduce your toxic exposure. In many cases, you increase it. You just stopped being able to see it. The risks got prettier packaging. They got brand names and pleasant scents and end caps at Target. The asbestos in the roof was obvious. You knew to boil the water. The plug-in air freshener is not obvious. The tap water looks fine. And your cat is licking it off the floor at 2am.

I live in Florida now, close to the water. That means I live close to everything that comes with it: rats, roaches, palmetto bugs the size of your fist, things that fly at you from directions you weren’t expecting. Florida will humble you fast if you think you can spray your way to a clean perimeter.

I broke down and hired a pest control service. It sort of worked. But the toxic smell was terrible. And even more worrisome, the beneficial insects I actually wanted were dying. Something needed to change.

Here’s something nobody tells you about living close to the water in Florida: the rats live in the palm trees. Once you know that, you just know it. I see them late at night, running the fence line. First time? Unsettling. Now? They’re just part of what’s out there.

There’s a squirrel family in the tree in my front yard. There’s a rat family in one of the palms. Every so often I spot a snake. I saw one recently that looked like it had just eaten a rat. Nature being nature.

Here’s the shift in thinking that changed everything for me: the goal is not elimination. The goal is an ecosystem. Beneficial insects thriving. Butterflies moving through. Birds whistling in the yard. The right predators doing the work that rodenticide was never going to do sustainably. As long as nothing is getting into the home, we’re not at war with what’s outside it.

That’s the whole philosophy. Build an environment that keeps itself in balance, and you need a lot less of what’s under the sink.

Houston, my cat, has been on a multi-year gut health recovery journey. Lyra, my special needs cat, lives with severe seizures and is on palliative care. Bella came to us having lived on rancid food, underweight, kept in a cage and pushed to produce litter after litter. She is on her own recovery journey now, and living her best life. When I look at the research on toxin load and environmental triggers across all three of them, I don’t see coincidence. I see a pattern I wish I’d understood sooner.

I’ve always been about removing the toxins. What I’ve learned is that you have to keep reading the labels and questioning things. And in our society of overabundance, a few simple items can do the work of most of what’s under your sink. Vinegar as a fabric softener. Castile soap for your floors, your yard, your counters. It isn’t complicated. It’s just different from what we’ve been sold.

Here’s what nobody talks about: the poison you didn’t mean to use is still poison.

The Environmental Working Group tested dogs and cats. Not near factories, not near Superfund sites. In regular homes. Cat samples came back contaminated with 46 chemicals total, including 9 carcinogens, 40 chemicals toxic to the reproductive system, and 34 neurotoxins. Dogs showed 35 chemicals, including 11 carcinogens.

Cats groom themselves constantly, licking off whatever has settled in their fur and on their paws. The dust on your floor. The residue on your couch. The air freshener you sprayed this morning. It all goes somewhere.

Dogs exposed to lawns treated with a common herbicide were found to be twice as likely to develop lymphoma. Pesticide exposure in cats and dogs has been linked to mammary cancer, bladder cancer, and oral squamous cell carcinoma across multiple peer-reviewed studies.

The ASPCA’s Animal Poison Control Center received over 451,000 calls in 2024 related to toxic exposures in animals. Four hundred and fifty-one thousand calls. In one year.

We think toxins live somewhere else. They live all around us. And under our sinks.

The Nose Knows — And It’s Getting Sick

Nasal cancer in dogs used to be rare. It is becoming more common, and the research points in a consistent direction.

Veterinary oncologists have documented a clear connection between chemical exposure and nasal tumors in dogs. Flea sprays have been correlated with nasal tumor development. Air fresheners are explicitly named as a risk factor. The mechanism isn’t mysterious: dogs breathe at floor level, where airborne chemicals concentrate. Their noses filter everything. Over time, chronic exposure to VOCs, synthetic fragrance, and chemical residue creates the conditions for malignancy.

A study of 25 top-selling air fresheners and laundry detergents found 133 different volatile organic compounds, averaging 17 VOCs per product. Of those, 24 were classified as toxic or hazardous under U.S. law. Formaldehyde, a known carcinogen linked to cancers of the nose and throat, is found in common household cleaners, new furniture, synthetic fabrics, and scented products.

Your dog’s nose is filtering your home’s air. Every plug-in, every spray, every paraffin candle is going somewhere. It’s going through them. And your pet bed, the one that feels soft and looks cozy, was almost certainly sprayed with fire retardant chemicals before it ever reached your home. Fire retardants accumulate in household dust. Your pet sleeps on that bed, breathes that dust, grooms it off their coat. Night after night.

The Store That Smells Like a Warning Label

Walk into a Bath & Body Works. The scent hits you before you’re through the door. People love it. I hear about it constantly: “I just picked up their room spray,” “I got the plug-in refills on sale.” I understand the appeal. It smells like something good is happening.

It isn’t.

What you’re breathing in that store, and bringing home and releasing into the air your pets breathe twenty-four hours a day, is synthetic fragrance. “Fragrance” is a legally protected trade secret in the United States. Companies are not required to disclose what’s in it. A single “fragrance” ingredient can contain dozens of chemicals, including phthalates linked to hormone disruption and VOCs linked to respiratory damage.

Bath & Body Works is not uniquely evil. Victoria’s Secret. Fabuloso. Febreze. Pine-Sol. Tide. These are household names that people trust because they’ve always been there. The conglomerates behind them are not concerned about your chemical exposure. They are concerned about market share. And as long as people keep buying, the formulas will not change.

Here’s the number that should end the argument: the European Union has banned over 1,300 chemicals from cosmetics and personal care products. The United States has banned 11. The EU operates on the precautionary principle. If there’s evidence of harm, the ingredient is out until proven safe. The U.S. operates in reverse. A chemical stays in until harm is proven, a process that takes decades and requires fighting a lobbying apparatus that spends hundreds of millions of dollars making sure it doesn’t happen.

Eleven. Against thirteen hundred.

The products are the same. The chemicals are the same. The difference is that in Europe, they’re not allowed to sell them to you.

“My Pet Seems Fine.”

This is the part where I lose people. And I understand why.

Your dog is energetic. Your cat is eating well. Nobody is at the vet every month. Everything looks normal. So why would you change anything?

Here’s the problem with that logic: cancer doesn’t announce itself at stage one. Kidney disease doesn’t wave a flag before it takes thirty percent of organ function. Thyroid dysfunction, liver stress, chronic inflammation all build silently, over months and years, inside a body that looks perfectly healthy from the outside.

By the time your pet is showing symptoms serious enough to alarm you, the disease is often already established. You’re no longer in prevention mode. You’re in rescue mode, trying to slow something down that had a years-long head start.

Integrative pet health coaching isn’t for sick animals. It’s for the animals who look fine right now, whose owners want to understand what’s actually happening beneath the surface and get ahead of it before it becomes a crisis.

When I work with a client, we look at bloodwork. We look at diet. We look at the home environment: what they’re cleaning with, what’s on the lawn, what’s in the air, what flea and tick products are being used and how often. We build a picture of the full toxic load that animal is carrying. Then we build a plan to reduce it.

That’s what I did with Houston. That’s what I do with every client.

The best time to start is before your pet needs it.

Your Home Detox Checklist

I’ve learned this the long way, across a lot of years and a lot of different environments. The good news: you don’t need much. A few simple things replace most of what lines the shelves. Start with three this week and build from there.

Air

• Remove all synthetic air fresheners: plug-ins, aerosol sprays, Febreze, paraffin candles, synthetic reed diffusers

• Swap to natural beeswax candles, which burn clean without releasing toxic byproducts

• Diffuse lavender essential oil for fragrance, one of the safest options for homes with pets

• Open windows daily; even 15 minutes a day significantly reduces the toxic load building up in your home. Indoor air is measurably more polluted than outdoor air.

• Add a HEPA air purifier in rooms where pets sleep

• Let new furniture, rugs, and curtains off-gas outside before bringing them in; formaldehyde in pressed wood and synthetic fabrics is a documented carcinogen

Bedding

• Your pet’s bed was almost certainly treated with fire retardant chemicals. Swap to certified organic pet bedding made with natural fibers

• The same applies to your own bedding; natural fibers where possible, and wash new bedding before use

• Avoid foam beds with synthetic covers; opt for wool, cotton, or hemp

Cleaning

• Replace ammonia and bleach-based cleaners with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint castile soap; it works on floors, surfaces, and as a yard spray

• White vinegar diluted in water cleans most surfaces without leaving chemical residue

• Vinegar is also your fabric softener; pour it where you’d normally pour Downy

• Skip the Swiffer and disinfecting wipes; the chemicals linger on surfaces pets walk on and lick off their paws

• Read every label. If you can’t pronounce most of what’s in it, it doesn’t belong on a floor a pet walks on

Laundry

• Switch to fragrance-free, plant-based detergent

• White vinegar replaces fabric softener completely; no synthetic fragrance, no chemical softeners on the fabric your pet sleeps against every night

• Eliminate dryer sheets entirely. Swap to wool dryer balls, or saturate a washcloth with white vinegar and toss it in the dryer as a natural fabric softener. It works.

Yard and perimeter

• Eliminate rodenticide entirely. Use mechanical traps or bucket traps, relocate don’t kill if possible. Max died from a neighbor’s rodenticide. Yours could too.

• Replace synthetic pesticides with food-grade diatomaceous earth; wear a mask, use a mister, apply around the perimeter of your home

• Use Dr. Bronner’s peppermint castile soap in a hose-end sprayer over your lawn to deter bad insects

• Plant a living perimeter: mint, rosemary, lemongrass, clover; find what grows in your zone

• Consider replacing grass with clover or mini clover; beneficial to pollinators and requires no pesticides to maintain

• Rinse your pet’s paws after walks if neighbors use lawn chemicals

Pest control on your pet

• Research every flea and tick product you use; many contain chemicals linked to neurological effects in pets

• Wondercide cedarwood and rosemary formulas are what I use and personally recommend

• Talk to your vet before changing any treatment protocol; integrative care works alongside conventional medicine, not against it

Water

• Filter your pet’s drinking water. The PFAS “forever chemicals” Erin Brockovich has spent her career fighting are in municipal water supplies across this country, in measurable concentrations, in cities that look perfectly safe on paper.

• For a budget-friendly gravity filter: the Purewell stainless steel system requires no electricity, no plumbing, and removes chlorine, heavy metals, and sediment

• For broader contaminant reduction including bacteria, viruses, fluoride, and lead: the Alexapure Pro is the stronger investment

• Stainless steel or ceramic bowls only; plastic leaches hormone-disrupting compounds into water, especially in heat

Food

• Read the label on your pet’s food the same way you read yours

• Rotate proteins; variety reduces nutritional gaps and overexposure to any single ingredient source

• Minimize ultra-processed pet food with synthetic preservatives, artificial dyes, and flavoring

• Fresh, whole food where you can; even partial improvements matter

Some links above are affiliate links. I only recommend products I personally use or have vetted.

What Actually Works

This isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being deliberate.

Every swap reduces the load. Every plant you put in the ground instead of a pesticide stake is a choice that compounds over time. Every bottle of Febreze you don’t buy is one less thing your cat is grooming off her fur at 2am.

One study found that certain household chemicals run up to six times higher in dogs than in their owners, in healthy dogs, in ordinary homes, with no known exposure event. Six times. Because they’re on the floor. Because they’re smaller. Because they live inside the invisible cloud of whatever we’ve chosen to keep things clean.

They are carrying our choices.

Max didn’t get the chance to make a different one.

We do.

That’s my birthday wish. Not for me, for them. For Houston, who is currently in the backyard laying in the cedar mulch, earthing, watching the critters in the yard. For Lyra, who had a seizure earlier today and is still fighting hard enough without needing to fight her environment too. For Bella, who already survived one life she didn’t deserve and is building a better one. And for every dog and cat and rabbit and bird living in a home where someone loves them deeply and has no idea what’s in the air freshener they bought at Target last Tuesday.

Start somewhere. Start today. One swap.

They can’t read the label. You can.

A Birthday Offer — Because This Is the Work

Max’s story, Houston’s journey, Lyra’s fight. This is why I built Integrative Pet Parent.

Integrative pet health coaching isn’t about replacing your vet. It’s about looking at the full picture: bloodwork, environment, diet, history, and building a real program for your specific animal. The kind of review that asks why instead of just treating what’s visible.

“I went looking for help after my 12-year-old dog, Handsome Guapo Hank, had a medical emergency where I truly thought it might be the end. His bloodwork came back ‘normal’ and X-rays showed no blockage — but his behavior told a completely different story, and I knew something wasn’t right. After stabilizing him, I was still at a loss. Before working with Jenn, I felt helpless and overwhelmed. This experience changed everything. Jenn shares her expertise in a clear, practical way and shows you a path you can actually integrate into daily life, especially when it comes to nutrition and overall wellness. Small, manageable changes grounded in science. I now feel confident and empowered as an advocate for Hank’s health, even alongside his vet.”

— Caroline, Handsome Guapo Hank’s mom

The full intake is $350. For my birthday week, I’m opening ten spots at $100.

Here’s what’s included: you submit your pet’s intake information and any recent lab work. I review everything. We meet. I build you a personalized program, the same process I used with Houston, the same approach I’ve taken with every client.

Your pet seems fine right now. That’s exactly when to do this.

→ Fill out the intake form here

After I receive your form, I’ll send you a payment link and we’ll get you scheduled.

This offer closes midnight Sunday, April 6th. Ten spots. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

The Voices Worth Following

These are the people who have been sounding this alarm the longest. They are not radicals. They are credentialed professionals who looked at the evidence and told the truth before it was comfortable to do so.

Dr. Karen Becker is widely considered the most well-known integrative veterinarian in the world. Her life’s work is connecting what we feed, what we expose, and what we lose. The story of Max came through her family. That tells you everything about how personally she takes this.

Dr. Marty Goldstein is a Cornell-trained veterinarian, founder of Smith Ridge Veterinary Center, and author of The Nature of Animal Healing and The Spirit of Animal Healing. Four decades of treating chronic and degenerative disease in animals through integrative medicine. His position has never wavered: what we put in and around our pets’ bodies is directly connected to what kills them.

Dr. Judy Morgan is an integrative veterinarian, acupuncturist, food therapist, and author of eight books on natural pet care. After 37 years in clinical practice, her entire focus is education. Her message is unambiguous: minimize chemicals. Start now.

Dr. Andrew Weil is a physician, author, and founder of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. His work focuses on human health, but the through-line is the same: the chronic disease epidemic in America is inseparable from our chemical environment. What harms us harms the animals living inside that same environment.

Erin Brockovich is the consumer advocate who helped build one of the most significant environmental contamination cases in American history, with no legal training. She has spent three decades fighting PFAS and industrial chemical contamination in water supplies across the country. Her message has never changed: chemicals shouldn’t enter our bodies before anyone proves they’re safe. We have the system backwards.

The Environmental Working Group produced the landmark Polluted Pets study. Nonpartisan, rigorously sourced, and worth bookmarking: ewg.org.

This is what Integrative Pet Parent is built for, cutting through the noise so you can make better choices for the animals who trust you completely. All content there is always free. Follow along.

Integrative Pet Parent

Prefer to read in the app without the inbox noise? You can switch to app-only notifications in your Substack account settings under Notifications. I want this to work for you however works best.

Sources

• Environmental Working Group, Polluted Pets study: ewg.org

• ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center, Top Toxins of 2024: aspca.org

• PlusChem / FDA: EU bans 1,300+ cosmetic chemicals; U.S. bans 11

• University of Illinois / Journal of the National Cancer Institute: dogs twice as likely to develop lymphoma with 2,4-D herbicide exposure

• Environmental Impact Assessment Review: 133 VOCs found across 25 top-selling air fresheners and laundry detergents; 24 classified toxic or hazardous under U.S. law

• PetMD / Vetster: flea sprays and air fresheners correlated with nasal tumor development in dogs

• NIH / peer-reviewed: pesticide exposure in dogs and cats linked to mammary cancer, lymphoma, bladder cancer, and oral squamous cell carcinoma

Last updated: March 2026. This is a living document — updated periodically as tools change and new ones earn a place on the list.

I didn’t plan to start a pet business. I was surviving.

For years I had operated at the presidential level — advance work, communications, and operations across WH, DHS, HHS, and large corporations. In a world where this kind of work doesn’t always come with a steady paycheck, I had been fortunate. Contracts were reliable. Work was consistent. Then the climate shifted.

The administration in power was not exactly welcoming to those of us who had worked with certain people. Contracts dried up. Opportunities that had always been there simply weren’t anymore. That’s the reality nobody talks about in those circles. Your livelihood is tied to relationships, to who is in power, and to whether the people you’ve served are currently in favor or out of it.

I was also getting sick. Regularly, seriously sick. What appeared to be bad colds, pneumonia at various intervals. We didn’t know yet that it was foreshadowing a much more serious battle. I was fighting things most people around me didn’t know about, while still showing up and doing the work.

And then, at the start of this already difficult chapter, I lost Jessie and Keiki within 48 hours of each other. My dog and my cat. Both of them, suddenly, unexpectedly. The grief of losing an animal is real and it is profound. Losing two at once, while everything else was already on fire, that was its own kind of breaking point.

I was tired. Tired of the temp work, tired of putting on a smile for people who looked right through me, tired of waiting for something to come through. I figured there had to be a better way. So I started pet sitting.

It made sense. I loved animals. I had always worked and been around animals. I needed income. I needed a way to heal my heart. I needed something that kept me moving and kept me close to creatures who asked nothing complicated of me and wouldn’t judge me in return. I signed up for one of the big-name apps that had entered the market and I got to work.

I was good at it. Better than good. I became one of the top providers on the platform, so much so that the app reached out and asked me what my secrets were. I also had to call them and ask them to add a third digit to their pricing field. Their system only allowed you to charge up to $99 at the time. I needed to charge more.

Still, in my mind, it was a bridge. Something to carry me until the next big contract.

Then a difficult client complained, after services had already been rendered. He had asked me to book off the platform to save on fees. I agreed. What I didn’t know was that he was setting me up, planning to file a complaint and get the services for free. The platform never called me. Never asked for my side. They blacklisted me overnight. Took the money. Took the clients I’d built. Took the reviews. Took everything. And refused to hear my side of the story.

I had contact information for some of those clients. I reached out, apologized, and told them exactly what had happened. Every single one of them said the same thing: We’re staying with you. We don’t have any loyalty to this platform. We’ll go where you go.

And there I was. A side hustle that had quietly become something real. A decision in front of me. And absolutely none of the infrastructure in place to support it.

I built the website, the payment platform, the scheduling system, the email list, all of it, in a scramble. That was a good problem to have. I had clients. The rest was just stuff to figure out.

That’s the point of this article.

Your first and primary goal is to get clients. Everything else you can build as you go. I’ve watched too many smart, capable people spend six months perfecting their logo, researching tools, and crossing every T before they open their doors, and then never open them.

Get your first dollar. Then build the machine.

Here’s the machine.

Before you spend a dollar, ask yourself these questions.

Not every business needs the same foundation on day one. But these are the questions worth having answers to, even if you’re still working through some of them.

Legal and structure: Are you operating as a sole proprietor, LLC, or S-corp? Have you filed with your state? Do you have an EIN from the IRS? Do you have a registered agent? Are there state or local business licenses required in your industry? Federal requirements?

Financial: Do you have a dedicated business bank account, completely separate from your personal finances? Do you have a bookkeeper? Do you understand your tax obligations? Do you have a business credit card? Do you have a contract in place before you take on work?

Insurance: At minimum, general liability. If you’re giving advice or professional services, add professional liability, also called errors and omissions. If you’re holding client data, look at cyber liability. Don’t skip this category. I’ve seen businesses get wiped out by situations that a basic policy would have covered.

Your runway: How many months can you operate without income? Three months minimum. Seven is better. More on this below.

Your banking foundation.

Open a dedicated business checking account as soon as your LLC or business entity is set up. Mixing personal and business finances is how you create a tax nightmare, pierce your LLC protection, and make your bookkeeper want to quit. I learned this from watching other people make the mistake. Don’t be that person.

Most default to the big commercial banks. I’d push you to think differently.

If you qualify, Navy Federal Credit Union and Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed) are two of my favorites. Navy Federal serves active duty military, veterans, DoD employees and contractors, and their immediate family and household members. PenFed started with a military focus but has since opened membership to everyone, no affiliation required. Both are member-owned, not-for-profit, and built to serve you rather than extract from you. Check your eligibility before you default to a bank that doesn’t have your interests at heart.

If you want a digital-first option built specifically for startups, look at Mercury or Relay. No fees, clean interfaces, and they integrate well with accounting tools.

On credit: Apply for a business credit card early, even with a small limit. You’re building a credit profile for your business separate from your personal credit. Running expenses through a dedicated card also makes bookkeeping dramatically cleaner.

I’m a fan of American Express. The points programs are genuinely valuable if you use them strategically, and the business cards come with protections and benefits that most people don’t take full advantage of. A great starting point is the Amex Blue Business Cash card — straightforward cash back on business purchases with no annual fee. If you travel regularly for your business, look seriously at the Amex Platinum. The annual fee looks steep until you actually inventory the benefits: airport lounge access, travel credits, hotel status, Global Entry and TSA PreCheck reimbursement, purchase protections, and more. For a business owner who is on the road, it often pays for itself in the first trip. The points also transfer to a wide range of airline and hotel partners, which means smart redemptions can fund travel that would otherwise come straight out of your operating budget. Know what you’re spending, know what you’re earning, and make the card work for you rather than the other way around.

The Oh Crap Account: I operate in themes of seven. Close your books within seven days of month end. And build what I call an Oh Crap Account with seven months of operating reserves. Not three. Seven. This is the money that doesn’t get touched unless everything goes sideways. It’s the difference between a bad quarter and a catastrophe. Build it before you think you need it.

Your domain.

Own your name on the internet before someone else does.

If you plan on speaking, writing, or building any kind of public profile, you need your personal domain. If you have business names, those are separate purchases. If you’re building a service-based business, consider buying the domains around your primary name as well. One strategy worth knowing: having multiple related websites that point back to your main site helps validate your presence and strengthens your search visibility. It’s a long game, but it pays off.

I use Porkbun for domain registration. Straightforward, well-priced, and it doesn’t nickel-and-dime you the way the bigger registrars do. I made the switch after Google sold their entire domain division to Squarespace. Fine, but the pricing went up and I moved on.

Go search your business name right now. If it’s available, buy it today.

While you’re at it, go claim your handle on every social media platform you can think of, even the ones you’re not planning to use yet. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, X, Threads, and anywhere else relevant to your industry. Your name is your brand. Reserve it before someone else does. You don’t have to be active everywhere. You just have to own the name.

Your workspace and email.

Once you have a domain, you need a professional email address. Not Gmail. Not Hotmail. Not Yahoo.

Every time I see a business card with a Gmail address on it, I think the same thing: whose company are you advertising? You are literally promoting someone else’s brand every time you hit send. If you want to be taken seriously, your email needs to end in your business name. Period.

Google Workspace handles this cleanly — email, calendar, Drive, Docs, all of it integrated and built for business. It’s what I use and recommend to almost everyone.

The exception: if you’re operating in a space where HIPAA compliance or legal data protection requirements matter, take a hard look at Microsoft 365 with Teams first. The compliance integrations can make it the smarter call. Know your industry before you commit.

Google Drive handles cloud storage and file backup within Workspace. Have a system from day one. Files scattered across your desktop is not a system.

Your website.

You need a home base. Somewhere that belongs to you, not a platform that can change its algorithm, suspend your account, or decide tomorrow that your content doesn’t fit their guidelines.

I learned that lesson operating off a platform that blacklisted me overnight. No call. No explanation. They just shut me down and took everything. Don’t build your business on someone else’s foundation.

Squarespace is one of my favorite options for getting up fast without sacrificing how it looks. Clean templates, easy to manage, no developer required.

I’m also a fan of Ghost for those who want a cleaner, more content-focused platform. If you go that route and want help with setup, I have a programmer I can refer you to.

When you’re ready to build the machine — funnels, automated email sequences, lead management, CRM — Go High Level does all of that and more. It starts at $97 a month for the Starter plan and replaces a stack of other tools. There’s a learning curve. Worth it when you’re ready. If funnels are part of your plan from day one, don’t wait. Start with the base plan and grow into it.

Whichever platform you choose, make sure your website has a privacy policy and terms of service from day one, especially if you’re collecting emails or payments. Termly and Iubenda both handle this affordably and keep you protected.

Your email list.

This is the one asset most new business owners completely overlook. It is one of the most important things you will build.

Social media followers are rented. An email list is owned. Platforms get acquired, algorithms change, accounts get suspended. Your email list goes with you no matter what. I know this from experience, not theory.

I use and recommend Substack. It’s where I publish The Jenn Files, and it gives you something rare: a publishing platform and a list you actually control, in the same place. Your subscribers are yours. That matters more than most people realize until the day a platform decides otherwise.

Start building your list before you think you need it.

Your security.

This one gets skipped. Don’t skip it.

Surfshark VPN is what I use. When you’re running a business from a coffee shop, an airport, or anywhere outside your home network, a VPN is not optional. You are protecting your clients’ data, your financial accounts, and your business. The cost is minimal. The risk of not having it is not.

1Password for password management. Once you have ten tools running you need this. It protects you and it protects your clients. Non-negotiable.

Google Authenticator for two-factor authentication codes. I use 1Password for passwords and passkeys, and Google Authenticator alongside it for an added layer of protection. Set this up early. Every account that matters should have two-factor enabled.

Your operational stack.

These are the tools that determine how money moves in and out of your business.

Invoicing and payments: Can your clients pay you easily? Square and Stripe are the two I’d look at first, depending on whether your business is primarily in-person or online. Ask yourself before you choose: do you need to add gratuity to invoices? Do you need contracts attached? HoneyBook and Dubsado both handle contracts, invoices, and client management in one place for service-based businesses and are worth a serious look.

One thing worth thinking about early: your operational tools will be shaped by your industry. Every industry has platforms built specifically for it. Generic tools work until they don’t. When I was building in the pet services space, we tested several options before landing on Time to Pet. It was built for that business model and it showed immediately. Before you default to a generic solution, research what the leading operators in your industry actually use.

Scheduling: Don’t make people email back and forth to get on your calendar. A booking link solves this in thirty seconds. Google Calendar has one built in and can be configured to collect payment as well. Calendly is another clean option.

Your phone situation: Think carefully about this one. Do you want clients to have your personal mobile number? How available do you want to be? What boundaries do you want to set from day one? If you want separation, Google Voice gives you a dedicated business number that rings your cell for free. SimpleTexting and Podium are more robust as you scale. Go High Level handles this too once you’re on that platform. There’s no universal right answer, but make a conscious choice rather than defaulting into one you’ll regret.

Contracts and e-signatures: Get a contract in place before you do a single dollar of work. Adobe Acrobat is my first choice. HelloSign and DocuSign are both solid options. If you don’t have a contract attorney, use a vetted template from a lawyer who specializes in your industry. A handshake is not a contract. I’ve seen what happens when people skip this step. It isn’t pretty.

Automation: Once you have a few tools running, you’ll want them talking to each other. This is where automation platforms come in. Think of Make (my preference over Zapier) as the connectors between your software. When someone fills out a form on your website, automation can trigger an email response, add them to your CRM, notify you via text, and create a task in your project management tool, all without you touching anything. It sounds complex. It isn’t once you see it in action. Start simple, one or two automations that handle your most repetitive tasks, and build from there.

Your books.

Get this set up before you need it. Not after your first tax season. Before.

Wave is where I’d start. Built for small business, clean, and handles the basics without overwhelming you. I’ve used it. It does the job.

When you’re ready to level up, look at Digits. It’s the AI-native accounting platform built for modern business — automated bookkeeping, real-time insights, invoicing, bill pay, all of it. It starts at $100 a month and it’s more equipped than anything else in the space right now. More money than Wave, but a genuinely different category of capability.

The broader landscape has changed significantly. Xero, FreshBooks, and a growing number of AI-native tools are all worth looking at depending on your volume and complexity. QuickBooks is still out there but it’s not the only answer and it’s not always the right one.

Remember the seven rule: close your books within seven days of month end, every month. Not quarterly. Not when you get around to it. Seven days. It’s the only way to actually know where your business stands.

What matters more than any software is having someone in your corner who knows how to use it. I work with a bookkeeper I trust completely. If you’d like a referral introduction, reach out to me directly.

Do not wait on this. Get a good bookkeeper and a good accountant in place before you think you need them. That relationship is worth more than any software on this list.

Your AI stack.

We live in a different world now. A lean, focused business owner with the right AI tools can move faster and operate smarter than teams twice the size did five years ago. What used to require a full staff is now enabling solopreneurs to build and scale real businesses. The playing field has shifted. A single person with the right tools can now compete with operations ten times their size. That’s not a prediction. It’s already happening.

Claude is my primary AI, where I do my thinking, my writing, and my strategy work. ChatGPT has its place and I maintain a paid membership there as well. If you’re in the Google Workspace ecosystem, Gemini is already baked in. These aren’t gimmicks. They’re part of how modern businesses operate. Get familiar with at least one of them from day one.

Blotato is what I use for social media content repurposing and scheduling. You create once and distribute everywhere. For a business owner without a team, this is the difference between a consistent presence and radio silence.

I also want to specifically mention Sabrina Ramonov. She’s a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree who founded and exited an AI company acquired by Pegasystems, and she now runs Blotato and is on a mission to teach ten million people how to use AI, for free. She has built one of the most practical, accessible libraries of AI education available for small business owners and founders. She also recently launched Women Build AI, a community for women building with artificial intelligence. Start with her free resources at sabrina.dev. If you are serious about learning how AI can work inside your business, she is one of the best people to learn from.

Don’t leave money on the table.

Two tools that require almost no effort and pay you back on purchases you’re already making.

Rakuten gives you cash back at thousands of retailers — stores you’re already buying from. Sign up, shop through the portal, get paid. It’s one of the simplest ways to recover money you’d otherwise leave behind. This is my referral link — we both benefit when you sign up.

Beyond cash back, think about how you’re earning on every dollar your business spends. The right credit card rewards program, the right cash back tools, the right loyalty programs — none of them require extra work. They just require paying attention.

The things nobody puts on the list.

Your working hours, and who knows them. You set the culture of your business from day one, including the culture around your own time. A service business will consume every hour you allow it to. Decide what your boundaries are, then hold them. This is harder than it sounds and more important than most people realize until they’re burned out and wondering what happened.

Your Oh Crap Account. Seven months of operating reserves in an account you do not touch unless you absolutely have to. Not three months. Seven. Build it early. Protect it fiercely. The businesses that survive hard seasons are the ones that planned for them. I’ve seen businesses that looked strong from the outside collapse because they had nothing in reserve when one bad month turned into two.

One more thing.

I built a seven-figure business from a 13-inch laptop, a mobile phone, online tools, and relentless focus and grit. I did it while fighting for my health. I did it while grieving. I did it when the contracts dried up and the options narrowed and the easy path disappeared.

The infrastructure matters. This list is real and worth building.

But none of it means anything without clients.

Get your first one. Then your second. Let the business tell you what it needs. Then build the machine to support it.

The businesses that make it aren’t the ones with the most tools. They’re the ones that moved.

Quick reference: everything in this article.

Banking and credit

• Navy Federal Credit Union — military and family eligibility

• PenFed Credit Union — open to everyone

• Mercury — digital-first business banking

• Relay — digital-first business banking

• American Express Blue Business Cash — cash back, no annual fee (referral link)

• American Express Platinum — travel benefits, lounge access, TSA PreCheck reimbursement

Domain and identity

• Porkbun — domain registration

Workspace and email

• Google Workspace — email, calendar, Drive, Docs (referral link)

• Microsoft 365 with Teams — for HIPAA and legal compliance environments

Website

• Squarespace — fast, clean, no developer required

• Ghost — content-focused platform

• Go High Level — funnels, CRM, email, automation, starts at $97/month (referral link)

• Termly — privacy policy and terms of service

• Iubenda — privacy policy and terms of service

Email list

• Substack — publishing platform and owned email list

Security

• Surfshark VPN — VPN protection (referral link)

• 1Password — password management

• Google Authenticator — two-factor authentication

Payments and invoicing

• Square — in-person and online payments

• Stripe — online payments

• HoneyBook — contracts, invoices, client management

• Dubsado — contracts, invoices, client management

• Time to Pet — pet services industry platform

Scheduling

• Google Calendar — booking links, payment collection

• Calendly — scheduling

Phone and texting

• Google Voice — free business number

• SimpleTexting — business texting

• Podium — messaging and reviews

Contracts and e-signatures

• Adobe Acrobat — e-signatures and contracts

• HelloSign — e-signatures

• DocuSign — e-signatures

Automation

• Make — workflow automation (preferred)

• Zapier — workflow automation

Books and accounting

• Wave — small business accounting (referral link)

• Digits — AI-native accounting, starts at $100/month

• Xero — accounting software

• FreshBooks — accounting software

AI and social

• Claude — primary AI for writing, strategy, and thinking

• ChatGPT — AI assistant

• Gemini — AI integrated with Google Workspace

• Blotato — social media repurposing and scheduling

• Sabrina Ramonov free AI resources — AI education for business owners

• Women Build AI — community for women building with AI

Cash back and rewards

• Rakuten — cash back on everyday purchases (referral link)

• American Express Blue Business Cash — cash back on business purchases (referral link)

Ready to build this out with someone who’s done it? That’s exactly what I do. Let’s talk.

If this landed for you, I’d love to have you in The Jenn Files community. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken. Subscribe here.

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Delta just stripped Congress of its perks.

Airport escorts. Expedited TSA clearance. Priority customer service. Gone.

CEO Ed Bastian made it simple: while TSA agents work without paychecks, members of Congress wait in the same line as everyone else. He called it inexcusable that frontline workers were being used as political chips. Then he acted on it.

I’m all for it.

But it got me thinking about something bigger than Delta’s fight with Washington. It got me thinking about the businesses we’re building and the cultures we’re creating inside them.

Who gets the perks? And what does that say about who you are as a leader?

I had a conversation with a business owner this past week who is in the thick of scaling. Smart, driven, doing the work. We got into benefits, and I watched something familiar happen. They started adding up the fees, the administrative complexity, the cost per employee. Health coverage. PTO policy. Team events. And piece by piece, they were talking themselves out of it.

I get it. The numbers are real. The complexity is real.

But here’s what I kept coming back to: the benefits you offer your team are not a line item. They’re a declaration. They tell every person who works for you exactly where they stand.

Are you building a business of haves and have-nots? Or, are you building something that carries people with you?

I’ve been following on TikTok. He’s the President and CEO of Sherman Portfolios, author of The King’s Business, and he teaches seven laws for running a business rooted in biblical wisdom. The first law is excellent.

Purpose beyond profit.

Why does your business exist beyond just making money?

He draws it from Luke 12:15.

“Take care and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

If your only reason to exist is revenue, he says, you won’t inspire yourself and you won’t inspire anyone around you.

I’ve built and exited a seven-figure business. I know what it looks like to scale something real. And I can tell you: the businesses that last, the teams that stay, the cultures people actually want to be part of, they were never built on profit alone.

They were built on purpose. And purpose shows up in how you treat people when it costs you something.

Delta’s decision cost them something. They gave up a relationship with 535 members of Congress to stand with the people working the security lanes for free. That is purpose beyond profit in action.

Weisner has another law he calls the Hot Dog Stand Effect. The idea is simple: lead in a way that if you went and started a hot dog stand tomorrow, people would follow you. Not because of the title. Not because of what you dangled in front of them. Because of who you are and how you led.

That’s the standard. Not what you gave people when things were good. What you did for them when it was hard.

I live in Palm Beach County. You want to see haves and have-nots in the same zip code? Drive along the water. Ocean villas starting at forty million dollars and up. Then go about two miles inland. You’ll come across neighborhoods where the homes are falling apart. Same county. Same roads. Same sky.

The USA is still the only place in the world where one generation can radically change what the next one inherits. I believe that. I’ve lived it. But you have to be numb not to see what’s right in front of you.

The gap doesn’t close because we ignore it. It closes because people with resources decide to lead with something other than self-interest.

That starts inside your own business. And, it begins with identifying what is your purpose… beyond profit.

So here’s the question I want to leave you with.

If you stripped away the titles, if you pulled back the curtain on how decisions get made inside your company, who gets what, who has access and who doesn’t, what would your team see?

Would they see a leader who built a business of haves and have-nots?

Or would they see someone building something worth belonging to?

Kindness is not soft. Compassion is not weakness. Championing the people around you is not a distraction from building a great business. It is the business.

The numbers matter. They always matter. But the numbers are downstream of the culture. Get the culture right and the numbers follow.

Build something people want to stand in line for. Not because they have to. Because they believe in what you’re building.

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Fear doesn’t show up when the stakes are low.

It shows up right before the most important decisions of your life. The ones that would actually change something. The ones where the cost of being wrong feels unsurvivable.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s neuroscience.

I was sitting in my car outside a townhome in the Virginia/DMV area.

The same car I also used to Uber between dog walks. Michelle McGlade was on speaker phone. Inside that townhome, a little Frenchie was waiting for her afternoon walk. I was about to go get her. But first I had to get through this conversation.

Michelle is one of those people who loves you enough to tell you the truth even when the truth is going to sting. Executive coach. Courage catalyst. Straight shooter. The kind of friend who doesn’t let you stay comfortable in a story that’s keeping you stuck. She wasn’t the first person to say what she was saying. My mom had said it. Others had said it. I was undercharging. I needed to raise my prices.

I was in tears.

Not because I didn't understand the logic. I understood the logic. If I was ever going to scale, if I was going to build a real team, disrupt the status quo of an industry that deserved better, and turn a dream into something that could outlast me, I needed to charge what the business actually required. You cannot build a legitimate payroll that meets state and federal labor laws on prices set for survival. You cannot carry insurance, hire employees, and build infrastructure on rates designed to be accessible. The math doesn't work. It never worked. I just hadn't let myself look at it directly.

Here’s the part that made it hard: I genuinely loved my customers. I valued the trust they placed in me. They let me into their homes, handed me their keys, trusted me with the animals they loved, and even had me over for dinners. Many of them had enormous hearts for their pets and modest budgets to match. I knew that. And if I’m honest, if I could have done it for free, part of me would have.

But that’s not building. That’s giving yourself away.

The fear wasn’t about the numbers. The fear was about the customers. I was afraid I would lose every single one of them.

And underneath that fear was a question I hadn’t fully answered yet: what was I actually building? A side hustle? A job I loved? Or a company. A legacy. A business that could exist without me being the one always holding the leash.

The answer to that question changes everything. It changes your pricing. Your hiring. Your systems. Your ceiling. You cannot build a company on side hustle prices. And you cannot lead what you haven’t first decided to build.

I’ve been reading Victor Marx this week. He’s the founder of All Things Possible Ministries, a man who has operated in some of the most dangerous places on earth. His frame on fear stopped me.

Fear lives in the amygdala. Purpose, mission, and love live in the prefrontal cortex. When fear is triggered, it wants you to avoid, hide, run, or freeze. But when you connect to your purpose, the prefrontal cortex overrides the amygdala. That’s courage. Not the absence of fear. The override.

What hit me reading that: I wasn’t in that parking lot failing to be brave. I was disconnected from my purpose. I was calculating losses instead of building vision. Fear had the room because I hadn’t given my brain anything stronger to work with. Michelle knew it before I did.

You cannot think your way out of fear from inside the fear. You need a reason that is bigger than the risk.

Fear of raising your prices is one of the most common and most expensive fears in business.

It sounds small when you say it out loud. I’m afraid to charge more. It sounds like a confidence problem, a self-worth problem, a mindset problem. Self-help has a lot to say about it. Most of it isn’t useful.

Here’s what it actually is: a fear of losing what you’ve already built.

Which means it’s a fear that only hits people who have built a reputation worth protecting. You don’t fear losing customers you don’t have. You fear losing the ones who showed up, stayed, trusted you, referred their friends. The business you sweated for. The clients you earned one relationship at a time.

That fear is rational. It makes complete sense. And it will keep you exactly where you are forever if you let it run the math.

Because here’s what the fear doesn’t calculate: the cost of staying small.

Every month you don’t raise your prices, you are choosing the business you have over the business you could build. You are choosing to remain the person doing the work instead of the person building the team. You are choosing a ceiling and calling it safety.

I sat in that parking lot longer than I needed to. I cried more than I needed to. I walked the little Frenchie. I drove home. I processed it for days.

And then I did the most intentional thing I knew how to do: I wrote an email.

Not a blast. Not an announcement. A carefully considered note to specific core clients whose trust I had earned and whose opinion I genuinely respected. I told them what I needed to do and why. I explained what building a real team required. I was honest about the math and honest about what I was trying to create.

Every single one of them wrote back. Every one of them affirmed the decision. Not one of them left.

We went on to build a thriving business and a thriving team. We helped change the pet care industry, pushing for greater transparency and elevating the standard of care. We built a business that mattered beyond the work itself.

The fear was wrong. Not because the risk wasn’t real. But because what I was building was worth more than what I was afraid of losing.

Victor references 1 John 4:18:

Perfect love casts out fear.

I’ve turned that verse over more than once since reading it. What it says at a practical level is exactly what the neuroscience says. Fear loses its grip when a stronger force takes the room. Love. Purpose. Mission. The reason you started building in the first place.

You don’t beat fear by eliminating it.

You beat it by giving your brain a better reason to move.

Whatever you are standing at the edge of right now — fear is not a stop sign.

It’s a signal.

The price increase you keep putting off. The business you haven’t launched. The cycle you know needs to break. The leap that wakes you up at 3am. That’s the one. That’s always been the one.

The jump is the only way through.

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My brother and I were watching Tom and Jerry when we should have been doing chores.

If you’re Gen X, you know exactly what that Saturday morning looked like. Carpet. Cereal. Possibly a sofa fort. The kind of cartoons that required nothing from you except to show up.

Mom and dad were out shooting a wedding. Professional photographers. Saturdays were their busiest days, and the deal was always the same: finish the list first. Dusting, vacuuming, dishes, bedrooms. All of it. Then we could enjoy limited tv time, including cartoons.

We thought we’d timed it right. One eye on Tom and Jerry, one ear on the driveway.

We miscalculated.

Mom came home early. Much earlier than normal. She walked into the family room, looked at us on the carpet, looked around at the chores not done, not even started, looked at the tv, and didn’t say a word. She walked over, picked up the large box tv, yanking the plug out of the wall, carried it outside to the garage, and threw it into the trash.

It didn’t just drop in.

It crashed. It shattered. We heard it from the garage door where we were standing, frozen. To a kid watching Tom and Jerry get destroyed in a million pieces — that is borderline traumatic. That is the kind of moment that imprints.

There is a reason Gen X’ers are so tough.

We didn’t have a television for seven years.

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Seven years is a long time when you’re a kid. I want to be precise about that. It wasn’t a week. It wasn’t a month. Seven years.

And here’s what I couldn’t have told you then: it was one of the best things that ever happened to us.

Without the tv, you find out what you actually do. We read. We went outside. We got bored — genuinely, deeply bored — and learned that boredom isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a condition that produces things.

Here’s what it produced in our family: opinions. Loud ones. Everyone in my family talks. Everyone has a viewpoint. We debate, we discuss, we argue, and then we eat dinner and do it again. Friends who came over for the first time would pull me aside afterward and say, “Everyone in your family has something to say about everything.”

Yes. We do.

I think seven years without a tv is a meaningful part of why. When there’s no screen to default to, you learn to articulate what you think. You learn to hold a position, defend it, and sometimes change your mind. Those aren’t soft skills. They compound in ways that take decades to fully see.

I came across a clip this week from The Madison, a new Paramount+ series from Taylor Sheridan, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. In it, a grandmother looks at her grandchildren and says what a lot of people are finally saying out loud: “…what spoiled little bitches we raised…”

The comment section was overwhelmingly one thing: she’s not wrong.

187,000 likes on a reel about a grandmother sitting in the wreckage of her own choices.

Some parents get it early. Some figure it out too late. Some never figure it out at all. The kids pay the price either way.

The difference isn’t love. Every one of those parents loved their kids. The difference is understanding early what a lot of people only see in hindsight. Discomfort is not the enemy. Ease is. Protecting your kids from every consequence doesn’t build them. It hollows them out. And one day you look up and wonder where you went wrong.

My mom picked up the tv on a Saturday morning in our family room and made sure that was never her story. None of us forgot it. I don’t think she did either.

I spent several years living largely out of hotels. Moving between projects, no fixed home base. When I finally had an apartment again and got my things out of storage, what I hadn’t sold in the meantime, there was no tv.

I could have gotten one. I didn’t.

Friends would come over and notice immediately. The wall where it was supposed to be. And then we’d just... talk. For hours. Real conversations. Not two people watching the same screen and commenting on it.

It turns out when you remove what people default to, you find out who they actually are. Yourself included.

When friends teased me about it, I had one answer: Whose convenience is this for?

I went ten years without a television. During a meaningful stretch of that time, I built a seven-figure business from scratch.

I’m not drawing a straight line between those two facts. But I’m not pretending the line doesn’t exist, either.

Building requires a certain kind of focused discomfort. You have to be able to sit with the problem long enough to solve it. Every time you reach for distraction before you’ve earned it, you’re borrowing against concentration you don’t get back.

The tv that shattered in our trash can on a Saturday morning taught me that before I had words for it. My mom wasn’t making a statement about television. She was making a statement about what we were there to do.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading a piece by Isabelle over at Wealthy Women Guide. She puts into words what doesn’t get said plainly enough:

There are people who pay monthly. And there are people who get paid monthly. The difference between those two groups isn’t income. It’s what they’ve decided to own.

Look at your monthly expenses. Not to judge them. Just to see them clearly.

Amazon Prime. Apple TV. YouTube TV. Netflix. Then the add-ons — HBO, Paramount, Disney, whatever came bundled with something else six months ago. That’s before we’ve touched the food delivery subscriptions. Add it up. Most people haven’t. Most people would be surprised if they did.

Now ask the question Isabelle is asking: what do you actually own?

Not access. Ownership.

Access feels like enough until it doesn’t. Until the platform changes the terms. Until the price goes up. Until the algorithm decides you’re not worth showing anymore. Access is rented. Ownership holds.

I go through this with people in our 22 Days to Financial Freedom course. The subscriptions are always there. Line items people set up and forgot. And the pattern underneath them is almost always the same: spending on things that fill time instead of build it.

There’s a version of minimalism that’s about aesthetics. White walls, fewer clothes, capsule wardrobes. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about a question you ask before every recurring expense, before every hour, before every habit:

Is this building my life, or just filling it?

When I moved to Florida, I finally bought a tv. I was in and out of the hospital more than I’d like to say, and sometimes you just need to lie on the sofa and watch something that asks nothing from you.

I gave myself that. No apology for it.

But here’s what ten years without one taught me: I knew exactly what I was buying it for. Not habit. Not background noise. Not because everyone else had one. I bought it because I had earned the right to choose it, and I knew the difference between choosing and defaulting.

That distinction matters more than people realize. Going without for a stretch of time doesn’t just save money or produce focus. It recalibrates your relationship with the thing itself. You stop consuming by default. You start consuming by decision. Those are not the same life.

Even now, tv on during the day is a sore spot. My parents know it. When I’m traveling for advance work or speaking, I can go an entire hotel stay without turning it on once. That used to feel like discipline. Now it just feels like what I do.

The Saturday morning when my mom threw that television into the trash — when my brother and I heard it shatter from the doorway — I thought it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I was wrong about that. I was wrong about a lot of things that turned out to be the making of me.

She wasn’t punishing us. She was building us. There’s a difference, and most people don’t understand it until they’re standing on the other side of something hard, looking back.

Whose convenience is it for?

I’m still asking. Forty years later, it’s still the right question.

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If you read Part I, you know the numbers.

The premiums that consume 94% of a $63,000 income. The friend rationing transplant medication. The MRI I’ve been waiting three months for. The gap between what Congress pays and what the rest of us pay.

Now, let’s follow the money that built those numbers.

Before anything else, I want to say this clearly:

I am not opposed to Medicaid reform. The abuse is real. I have seen it with my own eyes. Work requirements are not an unreasonable ask. Accountability is not cruel.

What I’m opposed to is a system that punishes the people who built something, paid their taxes, played by the rules, and still can’t afford to get sick. Americans who did everything right — bearing the full weight of a broken structure while the people responsible for fixing it are spending their days on the phone raising money for their next campaign.

Small businesses employ nearly half of the American workforce. They don’t have HR departments negotiating group rates. They don’t have taxpayer-subsidized Platinum plans. They have a browser window, a healthcare.gov login, and a number that doesn’t work.

The math does not math.

That’s the story. Let’s tell it.

The Abuse Is Real. I’ve Seen It.

I’m going to tell you three stories. No names. These are real first hand accounts.

I had a friend in DC, originally from Africa. She came over on a student visa, did one semester of school, then overstayed. Used an asylum claim to eventually get citizenship. When her father got sick, he came to the United States with no health insurance and simply went to the emergency room every time he needed care. That’s how it works. The ER cannot turn you away. He qualified for emergency Medicaid, which opened the door to broader benefits.

I watched it happen.

In Florida, I had a service provider, originally from France. From outward appearances, a thriving small business. Routinely booked, her own salon space, seemingly doing well. Two kids. She knew exactly how to keep her reported income low enough to qualify for Medicaid and subsidized private school for her children. I know because I overheard her on the phone one day making exactly that claim: that she had very little income and couldn’t work much. She also flies back to France twice a year to visit family. She hung up and looked right at me, as though we were in on it together, and said she had to make sure certain things were reported a specific way to keep her subsidies in place.

That was my last appointment.

I’m not telling these stories to vilify immigrants. My own mother is a post-war immigrant from Sweden who came to this country legally with nothing and built a life. The issue is not where someone is from. The issue is a system with enough gaps in it that people, from multiple countries, on multiple visa types, at multiple income levels, can find their way through those gaps while the people who actually need the program get caught in the crossfire.

The third story is closer to home.

She worked for me briefly at my pet services company. Critical thinking wasn’t her strong suit, and she wasn’t there because she wanted to grow. She needed a job. Single mom. Young. No baby daddy around. A baby depending on her.

She knew the game though. She didn’t need anyone to explain the system to her. She’d grown up inside it. Her mother had run the same playbook. Now it was her turn.

She showed up late. Response time was a problem. She had a baby and we were going to fight for her anyway.

Then one day she just didn’t show. No call. No warning. Nothing.

When she resurfaced late that afternoon, I asked where she’d been. She told me she had a bad tooth infection and had gone to the ER.

Why the ER?

She explained it like it was obvious: if she went to a dentist, she’d have to pay money. If she went to the ER, they’d treat her for free and give her pain medication.

She wasn’t wrong. That’s exactly how it works.

I wanted to scream, not at her, but at what built her. She didn’t invent that workaround. She inherited it. And somewhere down the line, her child would too.

That’s what a system looks like when it has failed long enough to become normal.

The fraud isn’t anecdotal. Former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg documented it in his book Fighting the Florida Shuffle: The Inside Story of Corruption in the Drug Treatment Industry and How One Community Found the Solution. How profit-driven operators lure vulnerable people into substandard rehab facilities, billing insurance until the patient leaves in an ambulance or a body bag. Patient brokering. Illegal kickbacks. Well-intentioned policies twisted into incentives for relapse over recovery. Aronberg’s task force made over 120 arrests and helped cut opioid deaths in Palm Beach County by 17%. The fraud was real. It was documented. It was prosecuted. And it still took years to claw back.

That’s what accountability looks like when someone actually does the work.

The fraud exists at every level. From a dollar here and there all the way up to billions. From individuals gaming eligibility to corporations overbilling Medicare by hundreds of millions.

And here is the question I keep coming back to:

How in the world can we continue to take care of the rest of the world and everyone who comes here if we can’t even take care of our own people first?

That is not a radical question. It is the obvious one.

The Job They’re Actually Doing

Members of Congress earn $174,000 a year. Taxpayer funded. To represent you.

Serve one term. Serve part of one term. Serve thirty years. It doesn’t matter. When they leave, they are paid for the rest of their life. A pension funded by the same taxpayers they stopped representing the moment they walked out the door.

Here is how they actually spend their time.

New members of Congress are handed a model daily schedule. Of a 9 to 10 hour workday, only 2 hours are allocated to legislative work. The actual job. The rest is fundraising. Call time. Donor outreach. Reelection.

The political parties expect members to spend 30 hours per week in party call centers located across the street from the Capitol. Buildings that exist specifically for this purpose, because it is illegal to fundraise from a congressional office.

They built separate buildings. Because the fundraising is so constant, so expected, and so central to the job that it needed its own real estate.

“Members of Congress spend too much time raising money and not enough time doing their job.” — Former Florida Congressman David Jolly

“Fundraising quotas are discouraging good people from running for office.” — Former Minnesota Congressman Rick Nolan

These are not outside critics. These are people who lived inside it.

In the 118th Congress, House members who ran for reelection in 2024 collectively raised $1.2 billion between January 2023 and December 2024. A House member in a competitive race raised a median of $7.9 million, roughly $10,900 per day.

Every hour spent raising that money is an hour not spent on healthcare policy. Not spent on the cost of insurance. Not spent on the small businesses carrying the full weight of a system nobody in Washington has been incentivized to fix.

An intelligence analyst I follow posted this before taking it down. I saved it because it said what a lot of people are feeling but won’t say out loud.

“I voted for no wars, mass deportations of the millions of illegals allowed to cross during the Biden administration, a better economy, and draining the swamp. The list was short. Yet every single person I had faith in has been blatantly bought or blackmailed. Fck you all. I’m not sitting idly by while you ruin our country and gaslight us. We aren’t dumb like you apparently think we are. Get ready.”

She took it down. That tells you something too.

That is not a fringe position. That is millions of Americans right now.

And the data explains exactly why she feels that way.

Who’s Paying Them

In the 2023–2024 election cycle, pharmaceutical and health product companies gave $26.4 million to Democrats and $16.1 million to Republicans. Democrats received noticeably more. At least 72 of the 100 sitting U.S. senators received at least $10,000 from the industry. Twelve received over $100,000. Seven were Democrats. Five were Republicans.

Both parties. Every time.

Top Senate recipients — Democrats, 2024:

• Bob Casey (D-PA): $520,776

• Jon Tester (D-MT): $401,885

• Sherrod Brown (D-OH): $372,314

• Jacky Rosen (D-NV): $266,422

• Ruben Gallego (D-AZ): $244,135

• Tim Kaine (D-VA): $200,824

• Adam Schiff (D-CA): $196,635

Top Senate recipients — Republicans, 2024:

• Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): $316,656

• Bill Cassidy (R-LA): $290,375

• John Barrasso (R-WY): $204,761

• Thom Tillis (R-NC): $131,955

• Ted Cruz (R-TX): $101,621

Source: OpenSecrets, FEC data released February 2025.

Now look at the House.

Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY) chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It is the most powerful position in Congress for healthcare regulation. His committee has direct jurisdiction over Medicaid, Medicare, and prescription drug safety.

In 2024, he received $534,102 from pharmaceutical and health product industries. Over his career, he has collected over $1.8 million from those same industries, more than any other currently serving Republican in the House.

When he became committee chair in January 2025, his PAC fundraising more than tripled. Around 100 PACs that had never written him a check before became donors the moment he got the chairmanship.

The man overseeing healthcare regulation in Congress is the single biggest recipient of healthcare industry money in the House.

Read that once more.

You can verify it yourself: Brett Guthrie — 2024 Campaign Finance Summary

The Revolving Door

Of the 51 lobbyists working for America’s Health Insurance Plans in 2024, 31 had previously held government jobs.

Government employees one year. Industry lobbyists the next. Writing the rules, then getting paid to work around them.

This is legal. Every bit of it. That’s the part that should keep you up at night.

The insurance industry didn’t buy Congress with illegal bribes. It did something far more effective. It built relationships over decades. Funded campaigns. Placed former employees in regulatory positions. Hired former regulators as lobbyists. Created a permanent, professional, well-funded operation that never stops running, whether Congress is in session or not.

By the time a vote happens, the outcome has often already been shaped. Not in the chamber. Not on the floor. In a dinner. A donor call. A hire made two years earlier.

Read that again.

By the time a vote happens, the outcome has often already been shaped.

The vote is the last step. Not the first.

The Money Machine. Both Sides.

The separate buildings aren’t the real problem. They’re the symptom.

The real problem is what happens once money enters the system. Direct donations are only the beginning. From there it flows through PACs, Super PACs, 501(c)(4) dark money organizations, leadership PACs used as personal expense accounts, and nonprofit structures where affiliated entities share an office while money cycles between them with minimal disclosure required.

This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is a system problem. And both parties have built the same infrastructure.

On the left: ActBlue processed $3.8 billion in the 2023–2024 election cycle. Its nonprofit arms paid out $407 million in a single year, reported as one line item. No breakdown. No list of recipients. Hundreds of millions of dollars moved through a tax-exempt structure with no public disclosure of where it ultimately landed.

On the right: WinRed is the direct mirror. Since 2019 it has processed over $2.8 billion for Republican candidates and committees. Same structure. Same lack of transparency. Same result.

Neither one is required to tell you where the money actually goes.

The rules were written by the people benefiting from them. That is why they haven’t changed.

The Vote

On July 4, 2025, Independence Day, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law.

The House passed it 218 to 214. The Senate passed it 51 to 50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaking vote. Only two Republicans in the House voted against it. In the Senate, only Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Rand Paul of Kentucky crossed their party.

One vote. That was the margin.

Who Actually Loses

Total U.S. healthcare spending in 2024 was $5.3 trillion. Medicaid alone accounted for $931.7 billion of that. The federal government paid 64.7% of the Medicaid share. It makes up 30% of the average state budget, the single largest category of state spending after K-12 education.

The top five states by total Medicaid spending: California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The five most populous states in the country. This is not a small program serving a niche population. It is the backbone of healthcare coverage for one in five Americans.

The system costs too much. That is not in dispute.

Let me be clear about where I stand.

Americans are among the most generous people on earth. We give. We volunteer. We build nonprofits and community organizations and faith-based programs that serve people in need, all over the world and right here at home. That generosity is real and it matters.

But the federal government’s first obligation is to American citizens. The people who were born here, built here, paid into the system here, and need it to be there when life falls apart.

Nonprofits exist for a reason. Private charity exists for a reason. Those are the right vehicles for serving people who come here seeking a better life. The federal benefits system is not that vehicle. It was never designed to be.

What we have right now is a system so riddled with fraud and abuse that it is failing the very people it was built to protect. Pathways designed for emergency care used as planned delivery strategies to establish eligibility. Emergency rooms used as primary care because there is no cost to showing up. Businesses run in cash while the owner qualifies for subsidies. Asylum pathways used as benefit pipelines.

Legal immigrants should have a path. But that path runs through citizenship, not through the subsidy system on arrival. That is not cruelty. That is a boundary. Every functioning country has one.

The groups that should never be touched: children. Pregnant women who are citizens. Veterans. Americans who built something, paid into the system, and need it to be there when life goes sideways.

The abuse is real. I’ve seen it firsthand — and it isn’t limited to one tax bracket. People who know exactly how to report income, structure their lives, and work the system while collecting benefits they were never intended to receive. The French salon owner wasn’t an anomaly. She was just the one who said the quiet part out loud to my face.

People with disabilities and seniors over 65 represent 20% of Medicaid enrollees but account for 51% of program spending. If Congress was serious about reform, that’s where the conversation would start — fixing the structure that allows the abuse, and protecting the people the program was actually built for.

Instead they cut the working poor. The people least equipped to fight back and, not coincidentally, the least likely to write a check to a reelection campaign.

That’s not reform. That’s convenience dressed up as policy.

The system needs to be rebuilt. What it does not need is to be blown up without anything viable to replace it. Right now that is exactly what is happening. The explosion without the safety net.

This is not a secret. Everyone sees it. Nobody with the power to fix it does.

And when Congress finally acts, the veterans lose coverage. The disabled lose coverage. The American children lose coverage.

The fraud goes untouched. The citizens bear the cost.

When hundreds of millions of dollars flow from lobbyists into the campaigns of the people writing the rules, the voices that actually need to be heard get lost. The constituent who can’t afford her prescription. The veteran waiting months for care. The small business owner paying full freight for coverage that gets worse every year and can't afford to lose a single employee to a system that was never designed to include her.

They don’t have a PAC. They don’t have a lobbying firm. They have a vote, and they’re starting to figure out that even that has been managed.

That is not reform. That is the system working exactly as designed, for everyone except the people funding it.

The Math Nobody Runs

A lot of people ask a version of the same question. I’ve asked it myself.

Why couldn’t we just do a flat tax for healthcare? Everyone pays 3%. Simple. Fair. Done.

It’s a reasonable instinct. Here’s the honest math.

A 3% flat tax on all U.S. personal income, wages, investments, everything, raises approximately $720 billion. Medicaid alone cost $931 billion in 2024. Medicare costs roughly another trillion on top of that. Total national healthcare spending is $5.3 trillion.

Three percent doesn’t cover it. You’d need somewhere between 6 and 7 percent just to cover Medicaid and Medicare as they exist today. To cover everything, you’re looking at closer to 22 percent.

But here’s what nobody tells you: the reason the math looks that bad is because the system itself is broken. The United States spends two to three times what other developed countries spend per person and gets worse outcomes. The problem isn’t the tax rate. The problem is what we’re funding.

Fix the cost structure first. Eliminate the fraud. Remove the profit margin from the middlemen. Then run the math again. It looks different.

That is what Part III is about.

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What You Can Do Right Now

Look up your representative at opensecrets.org. Search their name. Look at the top industries funding their campaigns. Look at how they voted on the One Big Beautiful Bill. Put those two side by side. You don’t need a political science degree to read what you see.

Call them. Not email. Call. Congressional offices track call volume. It registers in a way emails don’t. Tell them you know what they were paid and what they voted for. Tell them you are paying attention.

Vote in every election. Not just the presidential ones. The people making healthcare decisions at the state level run in off-cycle elections with very low turnout. Low turnout means your vote counts more. Use it.

Talk about what you pay. Post your number. Share Part I. Share this one. Both.

Run the search. Go to stridehealth.com. Enter your real information. No subsidies. Screenshot what comes back. Then enter zip code 20001, Capitol Hill. Screenshot that too. Share both. That is the story in two images.

The system is not broken.

It is working exactly as designed. For the people funding the campaigns of the people writing the rules.

We want a system that works for legal citizens who built something, paid into it, and need it to be there when life goes sideways.

That is not too much to ask.

Part III is the rebuild. Three real options. Real tradeoffs. What would actually fix this and what it would cost.

That is next.

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Sources:

Pharma/health gave $26.4M to Democrats, $16.1M to Republicans in 2024: Deseret News / OpenSecrets, January 2025

72 of 100 senators received pharma/health PAC money 2024, individual amounts: OpenSecrets, FEC data released February 2025

Brett Guthrie — $534,102 in 2024 (verified OpenSecrets screenshot), $1.8M career total, PAC fundraising tripled after chairmanship, 100 new PAC donors: OpenSecrets / Read Sludge / Kentucky Lantern, December 2024 – October 2025

America’s Health Insurance Plans — 31 of 51 lobbyists former government employees: OpenSecrets.org

Congressional model daily schedule, 2 hours legislation, rest fundraising: U.S. Term Limits, Issue One, Georgetown Government Affairs Institute

30 hours/week fundraising: Issue One Congressional Fundraising Treadmill, 2021–2024

$1.2 billion raised by House members 2023–2024, median $7.9M in competitive races: Issue One, 118th Congress Fundraising Treadmill, February 2025

ActBlue — $3.8 billion raised 2023–2024 cycle: OpenSecrets / FEC

ActBlue nonprofit arms — $407 million paid out in 2020 as single line item, no recipient disclosure: Capital Research Center

WinRed — $2.8 billion processed since 2019, FEC complaint filed by Campaign Legal Center: Campaign Legal Center, 2022

One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed July 4, 2025 — House 218-214, Senate 51-50: Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, July 2025

Total Medicaid spending 2024 — $908.8 billion, 64.7% federal: Health Management Associates / CMS, October 2025

Medicaid 30% of state budgets, single largest spending category: Peter G. Peterson Foundation, July 2025

CBO — 10.9–11.8 million lose coverage, $1 trillion in cuts: Congressional Budget Office, 2025

4.8 million lose coverage due to work reporting requirements: Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, June 2025

Arkansas work requirements — 18,000 lost coverage due to paperwork failures: KFF / CBO

People with disabilities and elderly — 20% of enrollees, 51% of spending: MACPAC MACStats 2024 Data Book

GAO — 70% of Medicaid recipients work 35+ hours/week: U.S. Government Accountability Office

Dave Aronberg, Fighting the Florida Shuffle — 120+ arrests, 17% reduction in opioid deaths: Amazon / Florida Politics, June–July 2025

Congressional health benefits — 72–75% taxpayer subsidized: OPM, Congress.gov

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Chris is one of the sharpest financial minds I know. Pro-snowboarder turned money mogul, founder of The Money School, builder of 19 companies. He’s spent his career teaching people how money actually works. He doesn’t alarm easily.

This week, he alarmed.

Debt. Deficit. The dollar. Oil. The bond market doing things that shouldn’t make sense, but make complete sense once you understand what’s underneath them.

He connected dots that most people aren’t even looking at, and he landed here: we are probably heading into an economic slowdown. Late 2026, early 2027, his best guess.

I watched it twice.

And then I went back to the conversations I’d been having all week with the business owners I coach.

Here’s what struck me.

Every single one of them is building. In spite of everything. Not because they’re ignoring the signals. They see the same headlines you see. They feel the same tightening. They’re watching their dollars stretch thinner than they did five or six years ago.

And let’s be honest about what those years were.

COVID hit small businesses like a wrecking ball. I know because I lived it. I had a pet services company. We were classified as essential services, which sounds like protection until you watch 90% of your business disappear almost overnight. Essential meant nothing when nobody was going anywhere. I watched people who had built something real. Real customers, real revenue, real lives. Just gone. Not because they weren’t good enough. Because the ground disappeared beneath them. Some called it quits. Some said they just couldn’t. I understood every one of them. I was fighting for my own business at the same time.

Then we spent years in a policy environment that made everything harder. Inflation. Regulations. Taxes. A cost of doing business that kept climbing while margins stayed flat. It was a grind that didn’t let up.

I’m cautiously more optimistic now. But concerned. The signals Chris is pointing to are real, and this is not the time to assume someone else is managing your future.

But here’s what I keep coming back to.

The people I’m talking to this week? They’re building anyway.

That’s not recklessness. That’s pattern recognition.

Because here is what history keeps trying to tell us, and what we keep forgetting every time the headlines get loud:

Half of all Fortune 500 companies were created during a recession or economic crisis.

Half.

Disney. Microsoft. Airbnb. Slack. Publix. Revlon. FedEx. Charles Schwab. Goldman Sachs. Burger King. Trader Joe’s.

And the ones you’ve never heard of. Vernon Rudolph started Krispy Kreme during the 1937 recession. He had a secret donut recipe, no money, and a borrowed car he used as a delivery rack. Tim Chen got laid off from his hedge fund job in 2008 and launched NerdWallet from his apartment because he couldn’t find honest financial information online.

Not built in spite of the chaos. Built inside it.

George Jenkins quit his job in 1930 — the year after the market crashed — and started what became Publix. He didn’t wait for conditions to improve. He saw empty storefronts and a population that still needed to eat, and he built.

Reed Hastings founded Netflix during an economic slowdown. Brian Chesky pitched Airbnb to fifteen investors before he got his first yes. Eight said no. Seven didn't bother to respond. He built anyway.

This is a pattern. And patterns tell you something.

When things contract, the noise clears. The people who were building on borrowed confidence stop. They freeze. They wait.

The builders move.

So here’s the question nobody’s asking out loud.

While the unemployment numbers climb. While the layoffs keep hitting. While your company quietly starts talking about “restructuring” in meetings that didn’t used to happen.

What are you doing to change your situation?

Not tomorrow. Not if they let you go. Now. While you still have a paycheck, still have leverage, still have options.

And before you tell me that AI is going to take your job anyway. Let’s talk about that for a second.

Maybe it will. Maybe it already is, in some form.

But AI is also the great equalizer for anyone willing to use it. It is not the end of human expertise. It is a tool that makes one person capable of doing what used to take a team. The question isn’t whether AI changes the game. It’s whether you’re going to be someone who uses it, or someone who gets left behind waiting for someone else to decide.

The people who are scared of AI are the ones who have one income stream and no plan B.

The average millionaire has seven different income streams.

Seven.

If you have one — and that one is your job — you are already operating with your hands tied behind your back. You’re one decision by someone else away from starting over.

That’s not a judgment. That’s the math. And the math doesn’t care how good you are at your job.

Subscribe to keep reading. The next part is the one that actually changes what you do on Monday.

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I had a call this week that ended with a proposal.

The person on the other end wanted my help building their business. Smart, driven, moving fast. Their offer: do the work, and get paid when they’re successful.

I’ve heard this before. It always comes from someone who has never had to build anything from scratch. Someone who doesn’t yet understand that expertise isn’t a gamble you make on someone else’s timeline.

I passed.

I’m not telling that story to be harsh. I’m telling it because it’s a perfect picture of where many people are right now. Waiting for someone else to create the opportunity. Waiting for the right conditions. Waiting to be validated before they move.

The economy doesn’t wait. And neither do the people who come out of a downturn ahead of where they started.

When I was building a pet services company, I knew my numbers.

Not the annual revenue goal. Not the five-year vision. The 22-day number. The 30-day number. The exact amount I needed to survive and make it to the next month.

And I did what it took to hit it.

I drove Uber. Early morning shifts, usually starting around 4 or 4:30am, chasing airport runs. Then I’d walk and care for dogs through the day. Then I’d catch the evening rush. Then back to dogs for evening walks. Maybe a few more Uber runs, and then grab some sleep before I started again. Rinse and repeat.

Sleep was limited. Very limited. The hustle was real. The 22 and 30 day numbers weren’t a framework. They were the difference between keeping a roof over my head and losing everything.

It was not a cake walk. I’m not going to tell you it was.

But, I’m going to tell you this: there is still tremendous opportunity in this country. Not in spite of the chaos. Inside it.

You just have to start.

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I want to tell you about my mom.

She’s 80 years old. A post-war immigrant, born in Sweden, who came to this country legally with her family and nothing else. They built a life. Built businesses. Raised a family. Did it the hard way because that was the only way available to them.

She is, to everyone who knows her, their personal Martha Stewart. The woman can take twenty dollars and feed a family like she’s running a five-star kitchen.

This year, she’s taking computer classes. She’s working on her memoir. And we’re building her a column on everyday nutrition. Real food, real budgets, real life. She has decades of knowledge that people need and she’s not waiting for someone to give her permission to share it.

She’s 80.

If she’s building, what’s your excuse?

Here’s the thing about a line I keep coming back to. Not endorsing the source, just the idea: look at everything you know. Everything you can do. Someone out there needs exactly that. Not a version of it. Not a polished, perfected, fully-funded version of it. What you already know, right now.

Your expertise is not a free sample. It is the asset.

I’m on a mission to bring back Main Street. Current day style.

Not the nostalgia version. The real one, where people build businesses that serve their communities, create their own income, and stop waiting for a corporation to decide their worth.

There are a lot of us on this mission. And small business is how it happens.

Here’s what I’m telling everyone I work with right now.

Create before you need to. The best time to build a second income stream was before the layoffs started. The second best time is right now, while you still have the stability of a job to build from. Use that runway. Don’t wait until the decision gets made for you.

Know your number. Chris is right that liquidity is the real problem. Not rates, liquidity. That’s true at the macro level and it’s true for you personally. What do you need to survive the next 22 days? The next 30? If you don’t know that number, that’s where you start. Everything else comes after.

Stop depending on one source. One job. One client. One income stream. That’s not stability. That’s a single point of exposure. The people who come out of what’s coming ahead of where they started will be the ones who built multiple ways to generate income before they needed them.

Watch what’s actually happening, not what gets reported. Chris says follow the bond market, not the headline. By the time it’s a headline, it’s already happened. The signals are already there. Act on them.

If you have an idea, even a rough one, and you want to run a scenario by someone who has actually built from nothing, schedule a call.

Book a call here

Not a pitch. Not a package. Just a conversation with someone who has been at zero, built to seven figures, and knows what the path between them actually looks like.

The economy does what it does. It always has.

Your job is to build something it can’t break.

Built from nothing. Rebuilt from less.

If this landed, share it.

The people in your life who need to read this won’t find it on their own. Forward it. Post it. Drop it in a group chat.

Main Street doesn’t come back without the people who are willing to build it.

Share

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Sources & Further Reading:

Chris Naugle — LinkedIn | The Money School

Half of Fortune 500 companies founded during recessions — Startups Magazine

U.S. Unemployment Rate — 20-year historical data, Macrotrends

Unemployment Rate Projections 2026–2028 — CBO (January 2026), Federal Reserve (December 2025), OMB (August 2025)

A dear friend. We’ve both been navigating a lot. His mother is in the final chapter of her life. Alzheimer’s. He made the decision to walk away from a job that required in-office time so he could be present for this chapter. No hesitation. He just did it.

We talked about what it takes to keep showing up when everything is hard.

He said it simply: You have to keep doing your best. You have to keep showing up.

This week has been full of conversations like that one.

I had a call this week with a woman who has spent her career in medicine. Years in neuro and ortho. Helping people overcome one of the most debilitating things a human being can face. Pain. Not the kind you push through in a day. The kind that rewires you. The kind that makes you forget who you were before it.

She works at the intersection of neuroplasticity and pain. How the body memorizes pain channels, and how to retrain them. Moving people from feeling trapped by something that controls their every move, to becoming powerful over it. Her entire focus is forward motion.

We’re working on something together that I’ll share when the time is right. But that conversation stayed with me long after we hung up.

There’s a through line in all of it. The friend showing up for his mother. The woman who has dedicated her life to helping people overcome pain. What I’ve lived through in my own hard chapters.

Here’s what I want you to understand about resilience and grit. You are not born with them. You develop them. You build them in the hard chapters — the ones you didn’t see coming, the ones you weren’t sure you’d survive, the ones that required you to find something in yourself you didn’t know was there.

And the way you build them is not pretty. In spite of what social media might lead you to believe — the botox, the fillers, the hair extensions — no knock against any of it. But none of it will overcome your situation. None of it will overcome the pain. The hard chapters require something that can’t be injected or applied.

You have to get mad. You have to fight. Hit something, preferably a punching bag. Scream if you need to. Cry if you need to. Feel the full, ugly weight of it. But don’t stay there.

You then have to get up.

That is not toxic positivity. That is not a LinkedIn post about pivoting. That is the actual mechanics of survival.

Then — and this is where it turns — you choose.

“The greatest power that a person possesses is the power to choose.”

— Keith Harrell

You look at where you are. You reverse engineer it. What needs to change. Where you need to go. What has to happen next. And then you execute. One step. Then the next. You start making progress. You start moving forward. And eventually — not all at once, not on a timeline you get to pick — you get to the other side.

And from the other side, you can look back. Breathe. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can laugh at what you were navigating.

That’s when you know the grit took hold.

There is not one person who ever wrote a book that starts with: today I woke up and my life is amazing, and next week and five years and ten years from now it’s even more amazing. The best books — the best chapters of anyone’s life — are where they found strength when they didn’t know how they were going to survive. How they were going to overcome. How they were just going to be.

That is resilience and grit at its finest.

You fight. And then you find the laugh. Because the laugh is what carries you forward when nothing else will.

I remember one of my many experiences in the ER. A systemic infection. Moving toward vital organs. The medical team’s plan to help it drain meant creating a surgical track — adjacent to the rectum — so gravity and the body could do what the body does.

Do you know what that means in practice?

Let me enlighten you. After the surgical procedure to create this track, you have weeks of draining and healing. And sitting down in a normal chair is not a comfortable position.

Nursing staff. Daily. Cleaning a surgical track in a place that does not want to be disturbed. Ever.

My mother — an RN, medically trained, a fierce and talented woman — was offered the opportunity to learn the procedure so she could do it herself.

She said no thank you.

We had flown her out to help care for me, as we had done many times. She was in the other room of my one-bedroom apartment. Praying. While I cried and pleaded and made my feelings loudly and clearly known to God, the nurse, and anyone else within earshot.

That is a level of pain that makes you want to cry, scream, and punch someone. In that order.

And we laugh about it now. Hard. The image of her on the other side of that wall, hands folded to her face, while I was decidedly not holding it together. It is one of the funniest, most human memories I have from that particular chapter.

But first you have to get through it.

First you fight.

Keith Harrell understood this better than almost anyone I’ve ever known.

I met him at a conference where he gave the keynote. He was impossible to miss. 6’7”, with an energy that filled every room before he opened his mouth. We connected months later. Made a point to get together whenever he was in town. Dinners. Conversations that went longer than planned. The kind of friendship where time doesn’t feel like it’s passing.

He was a dear friend. I love and miss him.

If you weren’t on the speakers bureau circuit in the ‘90s and early 2000s, you may not know his name. You should.

Keith was known as “Dr. Attitude” — and he earned it. IBM. Microsoft. Coca-Cola. Fortune 500 stages across the country. The Wall Street Journal called him “A Star with Attitude.” The Nationwide Speakers Bureau put him on their list of 22 Guaranteed Standing Ovations. He was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame in 2000.

He overcame a stutter as a kid. He built a career that changed lives. He wrote Attitude Is Everything — and he didn’t just write it. He lived it.

He taught that your attitude shapes your reality. That while you can't always control what happens to you, you can always control your response to it. That attitude isn't just how you feel. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

“Attitude is 100 percent of everything you do. Your attitude today determines your success tomorrow.”

— Keith Harrell

He meant it. Every word.

Keith was diagnosed with spinal cancer in May of 2010. He died that October. He was 54.

And by every account from everyone who knew him — his family, his friends, the people who watched him face that final chapter — he met it the same way he met every other one.

With his attitude intact. Right up until the end.

That’s who he was.

His words echo with me. Especially now, when I look around and see so many people I care about navigating very challenging situations and circumstances.

So here is what I want to leave you with. From a man who proved it with his life, and a dear friend I still think about often:

Attitude is not pretending it doesn’t hurt. It’s not performing strength for an audience.

It’s the decision you make in the middle of the hard chapter — before you know how it ends — about who you are going to be on the other side of it.

Be encouraged. Be inspired. Go be amazing.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks. For many of us.

But attitude is everything.

Show up. Keep working your way through.

Keith would tell you the same.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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Are you navigating a difficult situation? Considering a big change? What is keeping you up at night?

A plateau you’ve hit. A decision you keep circling but can’t make. A pattern that needs to break but you’re not sure where to start.

If you’re ready to stop spinning and start reverse engineering your way through — I’d love to connect.

Schedule a conversation

There is a version of the American healthcare debate you already know.

The one where both sides argue about coverage while premiums rise. The one where politicians hold hearings, give speeches, and fly home to their taxpayer-subsidized health plans. The one where insurance company CEOs collect eight-figure paychecks while the people paying their premiums skip appointments, ration medication, and hope nothing serious happens before they can figure out the math.

That version is not wrong.

But it is incomplete.

The part that has been left out is simpler and more devastating than anything being argued on cable news right now. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. The question nobody is asking is — designed for whom?

The insurance industry spent $183 million lobbying Congress in 2024. That is your answer.

He Made a List.

A friend called me Friday. Someone I’ve known since my twenties. He has spent his career in hospitality — the industry that feeds us, celebrates us, marks every milestone worth remembering. The kind of person who knows your name, your story, your drink order from three years ago. The kind who makes everyone in the room feel like the most important person there.

He called to say goodbye.

Before the MRI results. Before the priest. Before the machines and the beeping — he had a list. The people who mattered most.

I made the list.

For the past month, he had been rationing his medication. Not because he wanted to. Because he had to.

When you have had an organ transplant, the anti-rejection medications are not optional. They are the difference between your body accepting what kept you alive and your body destroying it. One medication alone runs over $500 a month out of pocket. On top of premiums. On top of everything else a person navigates when no employer is picking up any part of the tab — and when small businesses can barely afford to offer coverage even if they want to.

In this country, Amazon receives billions in tax incentives to expand. The person building something from nothing gets a premium bill they cannot afford.

So he made choices. Quietly. Without telling anyone. Putting on the tough exterior that gets you through the day while something slowly goes wrong underneath.

My heart broke when I found out. Because I didn’t know. And that is exactly how the system counts on it working. People suffer alone because suffering out loud feels like failure. By the time anyone finds out, it is often too late.

The Gap Has a Body Count.

Last August I got pneumonia again. My second time in a few months. When you have had more than half of a lung removed, pneumonia is not something you push aside casually. It landed me in the hospital.

What I thought was a sinus infection turned out to be a raging infection that had moved into the bone in my skull. Mastoiditis. I ended up in the emergency room. Five rounds of heavy antibiotics later, I am still navigating the aftermath. My doctors have ordered a specialized brain MRI.

I have been waiting three months.

Not because I don’t know better. Not because I stopped fighting. Not because my head stopped throbbing.

Because the cost is $3,000 out of pocket and the system has no answer for someone like me.

And I cannot access the imaging I need to find out if the infection is improving or whether we need to consider additional measures.

That is not a personal failure. That is the gap.

Before anyone suggests socialized medicine is the answer — I have been on a waitlist as an “urgent” case to see a neuro-ophthalmologist for five months. Five months. Urgent. The problem is not simply who pays. The problem is any system — public or private — that calls something urgent and then makes you wait half a year.

There are really only a handful of paths forward:

• Universal coverage — with all the wait lists that come with it.

• True market competition — eliminating state lines, letting companies compete nationwide, forcing the math to actually work.

• Eliminate the fraud and corruption — bleeding the system dry before anyone sees a dime of actual care.

None of these are easy. All of them are better than what we have now. That is where Part III goes.

But first — the numbers.

The Machine That Needs You to Die.

Gen X Female. Non-tobacco. $63,000 annual income. No subsidies applied. Real search on stridehealth.com. March 2026.

I focused on PPO plans — because when you are navigating serious medical needs, a PPO is not a luxury. It is the plan that gives you access to the specialists and hospitals you actually need. HMOs restrict your network. When your health is on the line, network restrictions can cost you your life.

Someone will say: there are cheaper plans. And they are right.

But an HMO restricts your network. When you are managing a transplant, a bone infection, a neurological condition, a cancer diagnosis — your network is not a preference. It is the difference between seeing the specialist who knows your case and starting over with whoever happens to be in-network this month. PPO coverage is not a luxury for people with serious medical needs. It is the minimum viable option.

And even the cheapest HMO Gold plan in Florida for a 63-year-old runs nearly $1,900 a month. That is $22,800 a year. For someone earning $63,000 gross — before taxes — that is 36% of their income. Just for the premium. Before a single claim.

The cheaper plan doesn’t make the argument disappear. It just moves the number.

Now look at what age does to the math. Real searches. Same zip code. Same income. Same plan tier. Ten years apart.

Florida — PPO — Female — Non-Tobacco — $63,000 — Unsubsidized:

Age 52 (born 1973)

• Gold PPO: $2,505/month — $30,065/year — Max OOP: $6,250

• Platinum PPO: $3,255/month — $39,064/year — Max OOP: $2,525

Age 63 (born 1962)

• Gold PPO: $3,788/month — $45,467/year — Max OOP: $6,250

• Platinum PPO: $4,923/month — $59,077/year — Max OOP: $2,525

Under the ACA, insurers can charge older enrollees up to three times what they charge younger ones. In Florida, they are charging close to that ceiling.

At age 63 — one year from Medicare — a woman earning $63,000 a year is quoted $4,923 a month for Platinum PPO coverage.

That is $59,077 a year. Her entire gross income is $63,000. The premium alone consumes 94% of it. She has $3,923 left for the year. For everything else. Food. Rent. Utilities. Medication. Life.

And the Max Out of Pocket column. One hospitalization. One emergency room visit. One serious diagnosis. She owes another $2,525 on top of every premium and copay already paid.

Now look at Washington DC — where Congress lives and works.

Washington DC vs. Florida — Platinum PPO — Same Person — Same Income:

• DC, age 52: $1,458/month — $17,518/year — Max OOP: $2,100

• Florida, age 52: $3,255/month — $39,064/year — Max OOP: $2,525

• Florida, age 63: $4,923/month — $59,077/year — Max OOP: $2,525

Members of Congress do not pay the DC rate either. Taxpayers cover 72 to 75% of their premium. A member of Congress pays roughly $365 a month for Platinum-level coverage.

$365 a month. While a 63-year-old woman in Florida is quoted $4,923.

We are not asking for a handout. We are asking for what Congress has. Or put them on the same system the rest of us navigate. Let them open stridehealth.com with their own money. Let them feel the table.

And while we are at it — every elected official should earn the median income of the state they represent. They should live inside the same healthcare system they legislate. And when their term ends, so does the taxpayer-funded salary. The rest of us build without a safety net. We show up. We grind. We do the impossible in spite of every obstacle the system puts in our way. That is what resilience actually looks like.

Two Women. Two Systems. Only One of Them Is Working.

Yesterday, the White House announced that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer — caught early, with an excellent prognosis.

I have had the privilege of working with Susie. She is one of the most accomplished women in American political history — and in January 2025, she became the first woman ever to serve as White House Chief of Staff.

And I am deeply grateful she has access to the world-class care she deserves — the White House Medical Unit, Walter Reed, Bethesda Naval, and federal employee health benefits covered largely by American taxpayers.

She deserves every resource available to her.

And that is exactly the point.

There are not one but two healthcare systems in this country:

• System One: Federal employees and elected officials. Insulated from the market. Subsidized by taxpayers. Designed to work. When something is caught early, it gets treated immediately.

• System Two: Everyone else. Exposed to every compounding failure documented above. When something needs imaging, you wait three months because the cost is out of reach.

The people running System Two have never lived inside it. That is not an accusation. That is the structural reality. You cannot feel what you cannot see.

Somewhere in America today, someone is rationing medication they cannot afford. Somewhere, a person is waiting three months for imaging their doctor ordered. Somewhere, a woman is deciding whether the mammogram is worth the out-of-pocket cost this month.

The difference between those stories is not character. It is not effort. It is not how hard someone worked or how much they deserve care.

It is a zip code and a job title.

370 Times.

The six largest health insurance company CEOs took home a combined $159.4 million in 2024.

• Andrew Witty — UnitedHealth Group — $26.4 million — 348x the median employee salary

• Gail Boudreaux — Elevance Health — $20.5 million — 370x the median employee salary

• David Cordani — Cigna — $23.3 million — 279x the median employee salary

• David Joyner — CVS Health / Aetna — $18.2 million — 299x the median employee salary

Source: Becker’s Payer Issues, SEC proxy filings, April 2025

370 times the median employee salary. For the CEO of the company deciding what gets covered and what gets denied.

The insurance industry spent $183 million lobbying the people who write the rules in 2024. Not to fix the system. To keep it exactly where it is.

That is not a broken system. That is a system working perfectly for the people who built it.

The Subsidies Were Never the Fix.

We did not arrive here because of one administration. This has been decades in the making — multiple presidents, both parties, administration after administration that chose the path of least resistance while the lobbying dollars piled up and the costs quietly compounded.

The enhanced ACA subsidies were not a fix. They were a bandaid. They masked an artificially inflated cost structure while insurance company executive teams collected hundreds of millions and rates kept climbing underneath.

When the bandaid was ripped off at the end of 2025, two things hit at once:

• The real unsubsidized price surfaced.

• Years of compounding rate increases — that never stopped — arrived simultaneously.

Premiums jumped 21% in a single year. That is not a coincidence. That is the bill coming due.

And it landed squarely on small business America and independent contractors — the people with no employer, no union, no government program standing between them and the full weight of a market that was never designed to work for them.

What happens next will determine whether small businesses and contractors can survive in spite of this. That is not an exaggeration. That is the math.

Eighty percent of this country voted for accountability. For the fraud and corruption to end. For a government that works for the people funding it. We want to provide for our families. We want the system to make sense.

We are still waiting.

$317 Billion Out. Zero Coverage In.

The United States is the only wealthy nation on earth that does not guarantee healthcare coverage to its citizens. Every other country in the G7 — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom — has found a way to cover its people.

We write the checks that fund the world.

In FY 2024, the United States sent foreign aid to 179 countries. Here are the top recipients — and what they provide their own citizens:

Top US Foreign Aid Recipients — FY2024 — and Their Healthcare Systems:

• Israel — $6.82 billion — Universal coverage. No deductibles. Funded by national income tax.

• Ukraine — $6.5 billion — Universal coverage system.

• Jordan — $1.75 billion — National health insurance. Majority of citizens covered.

• Egypt — $1.5 billion — Government-subsidized healthcare for citizens.

Source: USAFacts, ForeignAssistance.gov, Commonwealth Fund, FY2024

Since 1951, the United States has provided over $317 billion in inflation-adjusted aid to Israel alone. We are not suggesting these countries don’t deserve support. Strategic alliances matter. We understand that.

We are asking one simple question: why is the country writing the checks unable to cover its own people?

We just want what members of Congress have. Or put them on the same system we navigate. Let them open stridehealth.com and run the same search. Let them feel the table.

We are not asking for a perfect system. Every system has tradeoffs. But right now we have the worst of every option — the cost of a market system without the competition, the complexity of a government system without the coverage, and the fraud of both running underneath it all unchecked.

Go South, They Said.

People are leaving New York, New Jersey, California — drawn by the promise of lower taxes and a perceived better financial picture. The tax savings are real for some people.

But before you pack the truck, run the full number.

Health insurance in Florida runs significantly higher than most states — the numbers above prove it. Homeowners insurance has become nearly unaffordable in many areas. Car insurance. Flood insurance. The cost of staying insured in Florida across every category is not what the headline tax savings suggest.

Here is something I did not expect to say: my cost of living in DC was technically lower than what I am navigating in Florida right now.

Not because Florida is expensive in the ways people think. Because the systems nobody talks about — healthcare, homeowners insurance, car insurance, flood insurance — compound in ways that don’t show up in the tax savings headline.

Before you move: if you are self-employed, between 45 and 64, or navigating any kind of health situation — model the full picture. What you save in taxes may not cover what you lose in insurance costs.

These are the cracks that reveal how broken so many systems truly are.

The Search Takes Four Minutes. Run It.

This series does not end with outrage and no direction. That is not how I am built.

Run your own numbers. Go to stridehealth.com. Enter your zip code, your age, and your actual income with no subsidies applied. Screenshot what comes up. Then enter 20001 — Capitol Hill. Screenshot that too. Look at both. Share both. That is the story.

Call someone. Not a text. A call. If there is a person in your life you have been meaning to check on — do it today. You do not know what list you might be on.

Ask twice. The first answer is almost always “I’m fine.” Ask again.

Know your full number. Write down what healthcare is actually costing you annually:

• The premium

• The deductible

• The out-of-pocket maximum

• The prescriptions

• The appointments you skipped

• The imaging you delayed

• The ER visit you prayed wouldn’t happen

Own the number. Then get angry about it.

Make noise. Call your representatives. Show up. Vote in every election — not just the presidential ones. The people deciding this are not personally exposed to the consequences. They need to hear from the people who are.

Talk about it. The silence around healthcare costs is part of what keeps the system in place. When people don’t say what they’re actually paying, nobody knows how broken it really is.

Say it out loud.

Part II: Follow the Money. It Goes Somewhere Ugly.

This is Part I of a three-part series — The Gap — on what it costs to be in the middle in America right now.

Part II — Follow the Money. Who voted against Medicaid expansion. When. What their top donor industries are. The lobbying dollars flowing between the insurance industry and the people writing healthcare policy. All public record. All traceable. Side by side. No spin required.

Part III — The Rebuild. Three options. Real tradeoffs. What would actually fix it and what it would cost to get there.

The system is not broken.

It is working exactly as designed.

The only question left is whether we are willing to change who it works for.

The Jenn Files covers business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken. If this hit something, subscribe. Share it with someone who needs to read it. And if you want to go deeper, become a paid subscriber — the work that goes into this publication depends on your support.

Subscribe now

Sources:

• Insurance industry lobbying spend $183M in 2024: OpenSecrets.org

• Premium comparison data: stridehealth.com, March 2026, unsubsidized rates, female, non-tobacco, income $63,000

• Age rating: ACA allows insurers to charge older enrollees up to 3x younger enrollee rates

• Premiums up 21% year over year: ValuePenguin, January 2026; CMS data

• Six largest health insurance CEOs combined $159.4M in 2024: Fierce Healthcare, May 2025

• CEO compensation ratios: Becker’s Payer Issues, SEC proxy filings, April 2025

• Congressional salary $174,000 base: public record

• Congressional health insurance taxpayer subsidy 72–75%: OPM, Congress.gov, No Labels, December 2025

• US foreign aid FY2024: USAFacts, ForeignAssistance.gov

• Israel $6.82 billion FY2024: USAFacts

• Jordan $1.75 billion FY2024: Al Majalla, ForeignAssistance.gov

• Total US aid to Israel since 1951, $317 billion inflation-adjusted: USAFacts; CFR

• Israel universal healthcare: Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Center

• Jordan national health insurance: WHO Universal Health Coverage Partnership

• G7 universal coverage: Commonwealth Fund Mirror Mirror 2024

• Susie Wiles background: Britannica, Wikipedia, OpenSecrets

• Susie Wiles breast cancer diagnosis: White House announcement, NBC News, March 17, 2026

• 10 states have not expanded Medicaid as of 2026: KFF State Health Facts

• Enhanced ACA subsidies expired December 31, 2025: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

A young cat whose stomach hasn’t been quite right. A dog whose eyes are diminishing — and whose back legs and hips are showing signs of hip dysplasia and pain. A young pet who has needed blood transfusions just to make it through.

And then there are the pets whose owners have been told everything looks fine. But something still feels off. That nagging feeling that there’s more to the picture than the last vet visit showed.

Their people are showing up. Every single day. Because that’s what you do.

This week, we lost two dear friends. One was 55. The other was 82. And then tonight, another dear friend called from a hospital bed to tell me he’s back in.

I know what it’s like to be in a hospital. IVs in both arms, veins starting to collapse, doctors talking about putting in a port. I’d joke with the nurses about how they were making it difficult to work — because when you’re a small business owner, you do what you have to do to keep a dream alive.

By all accounts, I shouldn’t be here today. But I am. In large part because a few doctors were willing to look at things differently. To try something else. To say — let’s look at this from another angle.

That changed everything.

And in the middle of all of it — the grief, the hospital calls, the hard conversations — our pets are right there.

Loyal. True. By our side.

They don’t know about the business. They don’t know about the losses. They just know you.

They always show up.

Callie laid with her dad until the very end. Stayed right beside him. That’s what our animals do. They show up in ways that most humans can’t — without agenda, without hesitation, without ever needing to be asked.

I’ve always cared for pets. Long before it became a small business, long before the certifications and the coaching. It’s just who I am.

But those hospital rooms taught me something I carry with me every day. A different lens can change an outcome. Sometimes all it takes is one person willing to ask a different question.

Your pet deserves that same willingness. Someone who will look at the full picture, ask the questions that haven’t been asked, and build a plan around your specific animal — not a generic protocol.

That’s what this session is.

The Ask.

Would you consider becoming one of the founding 100?

The founding membership is $100 a year. One dollar more than annual. But what comes with it is the part that matters.

Every founding member receives a complimentary Integrative Pet Health Coaching session.

Before we connect, I want to see everything you have available — labs, imaging, bloodwork, medical reports from your veterinarian, what you’re currently feeding, what a typical day looks like, what you notice, what concerns you. Then I get to work. I build a personalized guide around your specific animal. We schedule a time to connect — video or phone — and walk through everything together.

Not just to live longer. To thrive.

That session is valued at $350. It’s included with your founding membership.

Become a Founding Member →

Not ready to go paid?

If you know someone who is carrying a lot right now — someone whose pet isn’t feeling their best, someone who needs a different perspective on their animal’s health — you can gift them a free month.

Send them in.

Gift a free month

It’s Friday. The week has been a lot.

Hold your people close. Hold your pets closer.

They always show up.

— Jenn

The Jenn Files covers business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken. Subscribe at thejennfiles.com.

For ongoing integrative pet health resources, visit integrativepetparent.com.

You did that.

You showed up. You shared it. You said yes, this is real and it needs to be said. This conversation is spreading because you are spreading it.

Thank you. Now let’s keep going.

You built something.

Maybe it’s small right now. Maybe it’s growing. Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle — real revenue, real expenses, real decisions landing on your desk every week that nobody prepared you for.

And then the renewal notice arrives.

You know the one. The envelope you open standing at the kitchen counter, or the email you click on a Tuesday morning before you’ve finished your coffee. The one with the new premium number.

You read it twice. Because the first time doesn’t make sense.

I wrote about this in Sticker Shock. The math that hits you when health insurance stops being a line item and starts being a crisis. The moment you realize the system you thought was protecting you was never designed with you in mind.

That piece resonated because you’ve been there. Most of you are there right now.

This one is about what you do next.

We Are the Economy

Before we talk about who to call, let’s talk about who you are.

There are 34.8 million small businesses in the United States. They employ 59 million Americans. 45.9% of the entire workforce. They represent 43.5% of GDP. They pay 39% of all private sector payroll. Over the last decade, small businesses created 55% of all net new jobs in this country.

99.9% of all American businesses are small businesses.

And here’s the number that should be in every conversation about insurance, taxes, and the cost of building something: when you spend $100 at a local independent business, $43 stays in that community. Spent at a national chain or online, that same $100 leaves $13 behind. Local businesses recirculate money through their neighbors, their vendors, their employees, their community. More than three times the local economic return.

We are not a niche. We are not a footnote. We are the backbone of this economy and the lifeblood of every community we operate in.

No business owner I have ever met said oh good, higher premiums. Not one. Every dollar absorbed by an insurance increase is a dollar that doesn’t go back into hiring, into inventory, into the community, into building something that lasts.

That’s not a political statement. That’s just math.

So when the system squeezes small business owners — and it is squeezing, hard — it isn’t just hurting the owners. It’s pulling money out of communities. It’s slowing job creation. It’s taxing the engine that actually runs this country.

Now let’s talk about who benefits while that’s happening.

The six largest health insurance CEOs collected $159.4 million between them in 2024 alone. The top earner was Andrew Witty of UnitedHealth Group — $26.3 million. One person. One year. At Elevance Health, the CEO earned 370 times more than the median employee at her own company.

Your premium went up.

Your state’s insurance commissioner, the public official whose entire job is to protect you from exactly this, earns somewhere between $86,000 and $222,000 a year in public salary.

Do the math.

We the People

The system wants you frustrated. Frustrated people give up. They pay the bill, swallow the denial, and go back to absorbing the cost.

That’s the design.

The corruption is real. The deal-making is real. The revolving door between regulators and the industry they’re supposed to regulate is real. Both parties have let it fester for decades.

We are fed up. We want fairness, accountability, and transparency. We want it all out in the open.

We the people are getting stronger. We are getting smarter. We are learning how to play this game.

You think we’re joking? You think we’re not strong enough?

Watch.

The Person You’re Looking For

Every state in this country has an insurance commissioner.

Their job, the one they are paid to do, the one they are legally obligated to do, is to protect you. The office is established by state constitution or statute. It exists because the law says it has to. They regulate the insurance industry in your state. They enforce the rules. They investigate complaints. They have authority to take action when insurance companies aren’t playing by the book.

In 11 states, that commissioner is elected directly by voters. California. Delaware. Georgia. Kansas. Louisiana. Mississippi. Montana. North Carolina. North Dakota. Oklahoma. Washington. If your state is on that list, your insurance commissioner answers to you at the ballot box.

We the people elected you in. We the people can take you out.

In the other 39 states, the commissioner is appointed, typically by the governor. Which means they answer to someone who answers to you.

Either way, there is a human being with a name, a phone number, a public office, and a staff whose entire job description includes handling exactly what you’ve been dealing with.

Most people have never heard of them.

Now you have.

How to Find Yours

Go to content.naic.org/state-insurance-departments.

Every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, and all five U.S. territories have a Department of Insurance dedicated to helping consumers. It takes 60 seconds to find yours.

You’ll get a name. A website. A phone number. A complaint portal.

Use it.

If your insurer unfairly delays or denies your claim, or does not honor your policy or state law, your Department of Insurance can investigate. They can request corrective action. They can take enforcement action when laws are violated. They track complaint patterns across companies, and those patterns matter when regulators decide whether to approve rate increases.

Your complaint isn’t just about you. It goes into a record. It adds to a picture. It is one of the mechanisms this system has to hold insurers accountable.

File it. Every single time.

The Second Lever

Beyond the commissioner, there are state legislators who sit on insurance committees.

These are the people who write the rules the commissioner enforces. They set the parameters. They decide what’s permissible. They hold hearings. They have constituent services offices built to hear from people like you.

Find your state legislature’s website. Search for the insurance committee. Find the member who represents your district.

Write them a letter. Not an email. A letter. Show up to a town hall. Call the constituent services line.

Tell them what your premiums cost. Tell them what you were denied. Tell them what you’re paying for coverage that doesn’t cover what you need.

They answer to voters in a way insurance executives never will. So make them answer.

We Are Done.

We the people are paying attention now.

We are tracking votes. Reading donor lists. Filing complaints. Writing letters. Showing up to town halls. Building paper trails. And we are not going away.

We built businesses from nothing. We made payroll when it hurt. We kept going when there was no playbook. We are not people who roll over.

Done with the denial letters written by algorithms. Done with premium increases mailed on a Friday with no explanation. Done with being told to appeal a decision made by someone who never looked at our file. Done with the lies, the abuse, the backroom deals dressed up as policy.

The people making these decisions are not sitting in some impenetrable fortress. They have offices. They have bosses. They have re-election cycles and appointment reviews and public records obligations.

We are holding you accountable. All of it. In the open. Where everyone can see.

Your Next Move

1. Find your commissioner. Go to content.naic.org/state-insurance-departments. Write down the name. Bookmark the complaint portal.

2. File the complaint. Denied claim. Unexplained premium spike. Coverage dropped without notice. Document it. Submit it. Keep every copy.

3. Find your legislator. Look up your state’s insurance committee. Find your district’s rep. Write one page. What you pay. What you were denied. What you need them to do.

4. Do not stop. Do it again next year. Accountability is built through repetition, not a single call. They are counting on you to get tired. Don’t.

The question everyone is asking after Sticker Shock and now this: how do we actually get premiums down? Not the sponsored answer. Not the broker pitch. The real strategies, the real structures, and an honest look at what it would actually take to fix this market. That’s next.

The system is designed to make you feel powerless.

You’re not.

You just need to know where to look.

One more thing. See this dog? This is Bella. She came from an unethical breeder/hoarder situation. When you’ve seen what neglect does to an animal, you don’t just want to love them better. You want to know better. Building a pet business from scratch and watching what people didn’t know about their animals’ health made that even clearer. That’s why I got my Integrative Pet Health Coaching certification.

Founding members of The Jenn Files receive a complimentary session with me — a $350 value. You send me your pet’s information, I build you a personalized guide, and we get on a call. Founding membership is $100, less than half the regular rate of $240. Only a few more days at this price. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the time.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

Sources

• SBA Office of Advocacy, 2024 Small Business Profiles

• Bureau of Labor Statistics — Small Business Job Creation, 2013–2023

• Civic Economics — Local Multiplier Effect studies (via American Independent Business Alliance)

• Fierce Healthcare — 2024 CEO compensation, six major national health plans

• Becker’s Payer Issues — CEO-to-worker pay ratios, 2024 proxy filings

• S&P Global Market Intelligence — Cigna/UnitedHealth CEO compensation, 2024

• Ballotpedia — Insurance Commissioner salaries, elected vs. appointed by state

• content.naic.org/state-insurance-departments — State insurance department directory

If you’ve been reading The Jenn Files for any length of time, you know that’s not like me. I show up. It’s one of the things I’m most consistent about.

But yesterday I couldn’t write. I needed to cry. So I did.

Randy Skoglund passed away just after midnight on March 9th. He was at home, surrounded by his family.

He was 55.

I wrote about Randy a few weeks ago. The award-winning digital strategist, the founder of Orange Hat Group, the guy who helped me figure out my first Google ad campaign when my pet services company was just an idea with a lot of hustle behind it. His family used our service. That’s the kind of people the Skoglunds are.

When I wrote that piece, Randy had just entered hospice care. His wife Kieta posted the update. Reading her words, “he would want me to thank all of you,” I had to put my phone down and just sit with it for a while.

55 years old.

At the same time, another family dear to mine is preparing to say goodbye to someone who lived to 82.

I grew up in Des Moines. My brother and I grew up alongside this family’s kids. Our parents have been close for decades, the kind of friendship that outlasts zip codes and job titles and every version of the life you thought you’d be living by now.

Their son posted today. He called his father’s passing:

“not a sad goodbye, but a celebration of his temporary life here.”

His sister posted a photo of a bench. A small metal plaque.

Dad. Loved and Remembered.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I’ve read that line from their son a dozen times today. For those of us who share a faith in God, the belief that this life is temporary and Heaven is real, those words are comfort. For those who are still working out what they believe, or who have walked away from faith entirely, I won’t pretend I have all the answers for you.

What I can tell you is what I know to be true for me: both of these men are in Heaven. And that certainty doesn’t take away the grief. It just means the grief has a container.

If you’re somewhere in the middle, not sure, or curious, or maybe just cracked open by a week like this one, I want to offer something simple. You don’t have to be in a church. You don’t have to have it all figured out. God doesn’t need your perfection. He just needs your sincerity.

Lord, I believe you are real. I believe Jesus died for me and rose again. I’m not perfect and I don’t have everything figured out. But I’m asking you into my life. Forgive me. Lead me. I’m yours.

That’s it. No performance required. Just a conversation with someone who has been waiting to hear from you.

Two men. Two families. Two different numbers on the calendar.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think 82 means a life more fully lived than 55. Or 55 more than 30. Or 30 more than 20. A life well lived isn’t a function of years. Tragedy strikes at any age. Loss is loss, no matter the number on the banner. What we can control is what we build right now, in this season, at this age, with the time we actually have.

Neither number tells the whole story.

What tells the story is what held.

Randy held. His wife’s words held. His family’s grace in the hardest days held. The community that showed up, all of you who sent messages his family read to him at the end, that held.

And an 82-year-old man who raised a family, a beloved wife, children, grandchildren, who can look at his death and call it a celebration. That held too.

I wrote in February that what falls apart reveals what holds.

I still believe that. But I’ve been sitting with another question.

What are you building alongside the business?

Because the business will have seasons. Revenue goes up and down. Markets shift. Clients leave. What you build alongside it, the relationships, the people who will sit with you, the ones who will read your messages to you at the end, that’s the part that doesn’t depreciate.

Randy knew that. His whole career was about connection, helping people and organizations reach each other. He lived it too. The proof is in every message Kieta has been reading him.

And then there’s Gary.

Gary Karr, whose birthday piece started all of this back in February, messaged me today to make sure I’d heard the news about Randy. We don’t talk every week. We don’t talk every month. But the moment it mattered, he showed up. That’s the friendship that picks up exactly where it left off, every single time. I consider him one of my dearest friends.

That’s what I mean by what holds.

If you’re in the middle of your build right now, head down, pushing hard, telling yourself the relationships can wait until you hit the number, I’m not here to lecture you.

I’ve been exactly there.

This past Friday, one of my dearest friends said goodbye to her cat. It was a hard week for a lot of people I love.

But I will tell you what I know now that I didn’t know then: the people are the asset. Everything else is just the vehicle.

Chase what lasts.

Randy’s memorial service will be held in Alexandria, VA on March 21st. A celebration of life will follow a private burial in West Des Moines, IA on April 10th. Details will be posted on CaringBridge as arrangements are finalized.

To Kieta and the Skoglund family, thank you for sharing him with us. We are better for knowing him.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit, cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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You probably saw a few posts. The floral bouquets. The brunch photos. The captions about celebrating the women in your life. And then, right on schedule, the other posts — the ones reminding everyone that this day is supposed to be serious. That it’s about inequality, labor movements, voting rights, and the long list of rights women still don’t have.

Becca Bloom wrote a sharp piece about this yesterday. She’s right. Both sides are correct. Celebration and seriousness have always coexisted in women’s history. That tension isn’t a contradiction. It’s the whole story.

But I want to talk about the day after.

There are women I want to tell you about.

Ann McLaughlin Korologos and her husband Tom were clients of my pet care business. Our team cared for who they loved — two yellow Labs named Sam and Winston.

Secretary of Labor under Reagan. Confirmed by the United States Senate 94 to 0. Chair of RAND. Chair of the Aspen Institute. Board member of Microsoft, Fannie Mae, and Kellogg. She received the President’s Citizen Medal from Ronald Reagan himself.

She was the kind of woman who walked into every room already having done the work — and the room knew it. She owned an art gallery in Basalt, kept horses, and according to everyone who knew her, was three steps ahead of the room without anyone realizing it.

Ann passed away in 2023. Tom not long after.

When she left her post as Secretary of Labor, her successor was Elizabeth Dole. The first time in American history that one woman had directly replaced another qualified woman from the same party in the same Cabinet seat. Ann didn’t just hold the door open. She handed it off.

I know Elizabeth Dole. Not from a distance. During her presidential campaign, I had the opportunity to be in the car with her — more than once. The curtain was down. And the woman I got to know — gracious, kind, exactly who she presented to the world — was the same in private as she was in public. That kind of integrity is rarer than people think.

The press wrote about how she looked. They called her a novelty. She was polling second in the nation.

That wasn’t ancient history. That was 1999.

Here’s what doesn’t make the posts.

The women who built things while the world was busy arguing about whether they belonged. The women who were sharp, exacting, difficult, and brilliant — and got called every name in the book for it. The women who pioneered methods now used around the world, whose names most people couldn’t tell you.

One of them saved my life.

Twelve hours on an operating table. Seven of them in active surgery.

There was a war room. Literally — a room where her team used 3D modeling to map what they were dealing with. They would go in. Dissect millimeter by millimeter for hours. Hit a dead end. Come back out, reconfigure, and go back in. Again and again. The mass was intricately woven around my pulmonary vein. Every move had consequences. One wrong decision and I lose the entire lung. Another wrong decision and I don’t come home at all.

She and two other surgeons, each renowned in their own right, worked in meticulous dissection. What preoperative imaging hadn’t fully revealed, they discovered when they got inside. What they thought was a straightforward removal became something else entirely. The mass hadn’t just attached. It had woven itself in, strangling surrounding structures, explaining six episodes of pneumonia over two prior years that had never made sense until that moment.

I’m alive because she didn’t flinch.

She has pioneered surgical techniques now used and taught around the world. Her methods have saved lives she will never meet. Her work lives in operating rooms on multiple continents.

Her bedside manner? Horrible.

Cold. Blunt. Not warm. Not soft. Not the kind of doctor who holds your hand and explains things gently. She told me what she needed to tell me, and she left.

And I have never been more grateful for a woman in my life.

Here’s what I’ve learned about women like her.

We get read wrong. Constantly.

The sharpness that looks like arrogance is precision. The bluntness that feels like coldness is focus. The edge that gets called difficult is the same edge that keeps people alive — in operating rooms, in boardrooms, in every room where the stakes were high and the welcome was conditional.

Women have had to be twice as good to get half the credit. That’s not a slogan. That’s a job description that got handed down through generations without anyone writing it on paper.

Think about what it took just to get here.

American women couldn’t vote until 1920. In Afghanistan today, they technically can — and practically can’t. The Taliban’s return in 2021 stripped women of rights they legally held. Male guardians required for travel. Violence at polling stations. The law says one thing. The street says something else entirely. In Pakistan, Nigeria, and across regions where Sharia law governs daily life, the gap between the legal right and the lived reality is wide enough to swallow a generation.

Having the right on paper and having the right in practice are two entirely different things.

Before 1974, a woman in the United States couldn’t get a credit card in her own name. Before 1988 — 1988 — she couldn’t take out a business loan without a male relative signing off on it. Husband. Father. Brother. The Women’s Business Ownership Act changed that. It was signed into law the year some of the women reading this were born.

Let that land.

Sara Blakely had the idea for Spanx in the late 1990s. She spent two years hearing no from every manufacturer she approached. She launched in 2000 with $5,000. Twelve years after women gained the legal right to get a business loan without a man’s signature. She built a billion-dollar company on an idea, $5,000, and a law that had only existed for twelve years.

My sister-in-law says it plainly: you can have it all. Just not at the same time. That’s not defeat. That’s the real math. The version that doesn’t get put on a motivational poster because it’s too honest and too true and too useful to fit in a caption.

And yet.

Anastasia Soare arrived in Los Angeles from communist Romania in 1989 with little English and almost no money. She learned English by watching Oprah on television. She had studied the Golden Ratio in art school — a mathematical principle of balance and proportion used by Leonardo da Vinci — and realized it could be applied to eyebrows. The salon she worked in didn’t believe it was a viable standalone service. In 1992 she rented her own room. Her brand peaked at a $3 billion valuation. Oprah and Michelle Obama call her the Queen of Eyebrows. Years after learning English from Oprah’s show, she shaped Oprah’s eyebrows on that same show.

Nobody saw it coming. She did.

Since 2015, the number of self-made female billionaires has jumped 81%. Their combined wealth now tops $1.7 trillion. Women-owned businesses represent 42% of all businesses in America, employing over 10 million people. Women now earn 58% of college degrees in the United States. More than half of medical school students are women.

Not because the doors were open. Because women got very good at opening doors.

That takes courage.

I built a company from zero to seven figures while fighting for my life. Literally fighting — the kind that happens in a war room with 3D models and three surgeons mapping a mass that had decided to weave itself around your pulmonary vein.

I’ve sat in rooms where I was sized up by my appearance, my hair, everything except what I actually knew. I’ve watched women get dismissed, talked over, and underestimated by people who would have benefited enormously from paying attention.

The women who made it through those rooms didn’t do it by softening their edges. They did it by being so undeniably good that the room had no choice but to adjust.

That’s what my surgeon did in medicine.

That’s what Ann did in Washington.

That’s what women have been doing in every field, for a very long time.

Here’s what I know about the women reading this.

Some of you have an idea. A business, a pivot, a next step you haven’t said out loud yet because the room didn’t feel safe enough or the timing didn’t feel right or you’re not sure it deserves air yet.

It deserves air.

The women who came before us didn’t fight for the right to get a business loan so that our ideas could stay quiet. They fought so we could walk into a room, sit at the table, and build something real.

If you’re ready to talk it through — to have someone sit across from you and be a genuine sounding board for what you’re building — that’s exactly what I do.

The first step is just saying it out loud.

A small group of founding members get access to everything — including me. That window is still open, but not for long.

Yesterday was International Women’s Day.

Today is the day after.

The flowers are on the table. The posts have scrolled past. The world is moving on.

But the women who are building right now — the ones in the OR at 6am, the ones running payroll, the ones who kept building when the room wasn’t ready for them — they didn’t stop yesterday and they’re not stopping today.

Becca said it best: go do the work that actually changes the next chapter.

Build something undeniable.

If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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