Interview with BCBS MA CEO Sarah Iselin

Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Sarah Iselin is a great asset for Massachusetts. I admired her work when she ran the Department of Healthcare Finance and Policy and then the BCBS Foundation, and was grateful for her rescue of Massachusetts' implementation of the Affordable Care Act. 

After a decade-long sojourn to Florida and California she's come back to Massachusetts just in time to address some big challenges. Among the topics we discussed:

1. The Steward Healthcare bankruptcy
2. Access to care -especially behavioral health
3. The health care cost crisis
4. Women's health
5. Value based care and the Alternative Quality Contract

I also enjoyed learning about how Sarah was inspired by her parents to enter public service and her early dates as an art student.

As of March 2025 HealthBiz is part of CareTalk. Healthcare. Unfiltered and can be found at the following links:

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Host David E. Williams is president of healthcare strategy consulting firm Health Business Group.

Episodes through March 2025 were produced by Dafna Williams.

Transcript

0:00:01 - David Williams
Massachusetts 2006 health reform law was the template for Obamacare. Today's guest, Sarah Iselin, played a leading role in developing and implementing those laws at Blue's plans and in state government. Now, as president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, she's tackling affordability, access, women's health and more within a health care system still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting Firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz Podcast, where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers. If you like this show, please subscribe and leave a review. Sarah, welcome to the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:00:48 - Sarah Iselin
Well, thanks so much for inviting me. It's great to be with you. 

0:00:51 - David Williams
Outstanding. Well, I'm glad to have you back in Massachusetts. I figured it's a good time to do the podcast. I want to wind back all the way, though, and talk about sort of your early influences, what your upbringing was like and, frankly, any childhood influences that have stuck with you through your career. 

0:01:08 - Sarah Iselin
Well, I hope, what is a pretty compelling story, because all of those early childhood influences really imprinted on me and are a huge part of how I ended up here now. 

So I am the child of two public servants and I grew up on Capitol Hill in Washington DC and you could literally, if you walked out my front door and just looked down the street, you could see the US Capitol. 

So I grew up on East Capitol Street, which you know DC dead ends into the Capitol and has a Supreme Court on one side and the Library of Congress on the other side, and had two parents who could walk to work and really made it very clear I have a younger brother to each of us just how profoundly lucky we were and the randomness of the fact that we got born into this family and the values that they imbued in us were to use this one wild and precious life that we have to try to reduce human suffering in some way. And they said you can figure out how you want to apply that, but that is what we expect of you, and so I wish that I could say I've been super strategic in everything I've decided to do since then. I had sort of a meandering journey, but those values are really what have guided, I'd say, pretty much every major decision I've made in my life. 

0:02:27 - David Williams
That's pretty good. Most people are influenced by their upbringing, but that's not like a pretty good, solid foundation. I noticed you left DC and, I think, went to the Art Institute of Chicago, which is not always the most obvious. 

0:02:39 - Sarah Iselin
I was in the hindering part. 

0:02:40 - David Williams
Yeah, yeah, I got you All right. Well, that's a nicely said. 

0:02:50 - Sarah Iselin
How'd you end up there? Well, when you grow up in that kind of a family. My mother worked in the Carter White House, my father was a chief of staff for a couple of different members of Congress and a senator and you know talked about things like intercontinental ballistic missiles at the dinner table and nuclear arms control. Both my parents worked in the arms control community at the dinner table and nuclear arms control Both my parents worked in the arms control community. 

My response and I went to a very intense small high school with all kids who I knew were smarter than I was, and my response to all of that was like get me out of here and let me find something where I feel like I can kind of distinguish myself. And that was what I'd taken a lot of classes during the high school years at the now gone Corcoran School of Art, attached to the Corcoran Museum of Art, and so I went to art school. But when I got there and I still have this creative part of me, but when I got there I pretty quickly figured out oh, that you know, reduce human suffering and the way the kind of art that I make I wasn't feeling like I was having is not that people can't, but I wasn't feeling like I was having as not that people can't, but I wasn't feeling like I was having as direct an impact as I wanted to and I stumbled into healthcare. 

0:03:51 - David Williams
Yeah, sounds good. So at some point you went to the Harvard School of Public Health, which is a more traditional path, in a sense. For where you ended up, was that right after college or did? 

0:04:01 - Sarah Iselin
you do some stuff in between. So I followed my heart to Boston after I graduated from college and got an entry level job working for the Visiting Nurse Association, which is one of the, if not the oldest, VNA I think it's the oldest VNA in the country actually and you know, really was a patient care coordinator. So picking up the phone and scheduling patients who'd come out of the hospital or out of long-term care or rehab facilities, matching them up with a nurse, and had a front row seat into the lives of some of the most vulnerable members of our community. And I got kind of the health care bug pretty early. 

And one of the wonderful things about working for a small health care organization is you get to see all the parts. You get to see everything from where do your admissions come from? You actually get into people's houses and then you get to see what happens to them afterwards when they're discharged from care, and the complexity of the system, the vulnerability of people when they need it the most. I just I got hooked and so after about three and a half years there figured I probably need to learn more about this and so applied to graduate schools all over the country and somebody at Harvard was crazy enough to let me in, and and so stayed in Boston, and you know, here I am, back in this community. You know, all those years later, Sounds good. 

0:05:22 - David Williams
So I know I think we ran into each other when you were in state government originally and you know, people sometimes say that you know Chia. Now that's kind of like a weird name, that's a bad name, but they don't say that when they know that it used to be called "Dick-Fip." right. So you know it's an upgrade from that. So how did you? What did you do after? You know, how did you get there? That's where our path started together, right, and I even think that it started when before that. 

0:05:47 - Sarah Iselin
I have a vivid memory of a really fantastic talk that you gave when I was on the board of MHQP Mass Health Quality Partners and Barbara Rabson brought you in to talk to the board about healthcare trends and strategy and you gave a really great talk that I remember. It was probably 25 years ago I remember it may have been. 

Thank you. So when I finished, I was very lucky during graduate school to do an internship at the Division of Healthcare Finance and Policy. So way back when you may remember, there was the Massachusetts Healthcare Purchaser Group, so it was a very early coalition of healthcare purchasers, employers and state government, and they did a rate analysis that they commissioned. Interestingly, this private sector group commissioned a state government agency to look at health plan rates every year, and so that was actually my summer project between my first and second year of graduate school and so found myself in this really lucky position. I went on and worked for the Mass Hospital Association and then came to Blue Cross with Andrew Dreyfus to work at the foundation. 

When Governor Deval Patrick was elected, I had this amazing opportunity to go back and be the commissioner of the agency you referenced, the Division of Career, Finance and Policy about seven years after I'd been an intern there in graduate school. So talk about terrifying career opportunities and experiences was to go back as the former intern to being the commissioner, and. But it was really an extraordinary opportunity and a great agency that, even in its current incarnation, I still think of as one of the jewels within the health and human services and health care policy infrastructure in the state. 

0:07:25 - David Williams
So, sarah, after you were in you know, came back to Massachusetts school, did a bunch of stuff in the healthcare sector here. Then you went down to the Southeast and then the Southwest Exactly, so what? Was that about? What was that like? 

0:07:37 - Sarah Iselin
So when I left the Patrick administration I came back to Blue Cross and ran the foundation. So where I had been the policy director ran the foundation and then got tapped to go back over and lead strategy on the corporate side here at Blue Cross. And you may remember when state government was having all the same challenges implementing the Affordable Care Act that the federal government had Do you remember the whole disaster around healthcare.gov? Well, the state had done something that at the time seemed really smart, which was to hire the same vendor that the federal government had hired to actually do the implementation of the website and some of those really critical parts of the consumer interface with this new coverage law. And that ended up not being that great a decision because the vendor really blew it. 

And so I'd gotten a call from the governor's office to say, hey, would you be willing to come back into state service to lead on a temporary basis helping us dig out and get the implementation of the Affordable Care Act back on track. And when I did that I met. I did that for four months and went back to Blue Cross afterwards to my job and then got a call from Optum, part of UnitedHe Group that had been the systems integrator for that project and said hey, we just watched you for four months on this project, you want to come join us? And so I actually left and spent a couple of years leading the federal government business for Optum, part of United Health Group, and then got tapped to go work at the Blue Plan in Florida where I spent four and a half years commuting between Boston and Florida. 

0:09:11 - David Williams
Yeah, you're dredging up some repressed memories, one of which was I remember we had the 06 healthcare reform in Massachusetts and Obamacare was modeled on that and I figured but we already have it, so it should be straightforward to implement, and it turned out it was not at all straightforward. It was not just you're good, it was quite a transition. 

0:09:29 - Sarah Iselin
Well, and there are all these complexities, and so there was both. 

You had to do different things in terms of plugging into this federal marketplace, so there were operational and technical, but then you had to reconcile that with the fact that we actually have a more generous law in many ways. I mean, the Affordable Care Act was a lot bigger than just the coverage provisions of the law, but that Chapter 1, we have higher subsidies, we still have higher subsidies, and so needing to figure out how do you administer and not lose those parts of our law that were working so well for our community and have it fit into this broader now federal framework had a lot of complexity. So I'm happy to say that, long after I left, the state continues to do a really fantastic job and we continue to be one of the states with the lowest uninsured rates. But it was a real highlight of my career to get to be a part of that extraordinary group of people that came together to get the law passed, to implement the law and now, all these years later, to keep that success story still going strong. 

0:10:28 - David Williams
Great, okay, so Florida four years there. 

0:10:32 - Sarah Iselin
Four and a half years. Four and a half years, yeah. 

0:10:34 - David Williams
Yeah, and then out to California. 

0:10:37 - Sarah Iselin
I clearly like the blues. 

0:10:39 - David Williams
I got that. 

0:10:39 - Sarah Iselin
Yeah, well, there's something about I mean for me and my my absolute favorite jobs have been in government and I tend to think about I'm a person who's really motivated. If you go back to my early values. I think about impact and think about where I level or the state level. They're the largest employers on the planet. The federal government and retirees there has more employees than even the largest private sector company, which is Walmart, by you know a couple times. And then it's a regulator. It's a huge healthcare purchaser, not just for employees and retirees, but through the Medicare program, the Medicaid program, but after that, if you want to influence health care, it's payers. The blues are really special. And so together the system covers almost 120 million Americans. It is the largest part of our private health insurance system and there are mission-driven plans that are making decisions in light of that mission that are really in the best interest of the communities in which we work and the members and employers and customers we serve. 

0:11:55 - David Williams
Great, all right. So after a sojourn out in California, back to Massachusetts, and I assume that you were groomed for the job and I'm sure Andrew was happy to have a worthy successor come in. But maybe it's more complicated than that. 

0:12:08 - Sarah Iselin
It's a little more complicated. Well, in the sense complicated I am. Well in the sense that I mean I moved to California. I mean I really I put a house in Boston on the market. I thought Florida, I commuted because my kids were still here and still they're now all off in college. But so I'd gone back and forth and but California, the kids were basically all launched. I was looking at houses, I was there for a year and a half. I was just about to put an offer on a house in the San Francisco area. I was hiking every weekend. It was heavenly. 

I thought what a great second or third act however you want to count it of my life, great next chapter, after getting the kids off on their own paths. And so when I got called by the headhunter, say, do you want to be a part of this? I thought well, of course this is an extraordinary plan, extraordinary community. It's home. But I didn't, you know, I didn't expect to get it. 

There are so many talented people, not only in this community but nationally. You'd be incredibly arrogant to think anytime you put your hat in the ring for the top job or a senior job anywhere, that you're going to get it. But I went through the process and when I did I was like pinch me. So it's been an incredible privilege and really the opportunity of a lifetime to get to. You know, have Andrew pass the baton to me. He and I have a long history of working together. He's one of the most profound mentors in my life, but I've been gone for almost 10 years. Yeah, wow, so groomed in the sense of. I learned a lot of what I know from him, but I had I wasn't working here for about a decade. 

0:13:37 - David Williams
Yeah, fair enough, fair enough, all right. So let's talk about some of your priorities at Blue Cross, blue Shield of Massachusetts. Now that you're, you're running the place and I think we have to start with healthcare costs one way or the other. You mentioned before about the purchaser group. That was some of the employers getting together and employers have been pretty quiet in Massachusetts until recently and there is a new employer coalition and there is a renewed focus on cost. What's your take on costs in healthcare in Massachusetts in particular? 

0:14:07 - Sarah Iselin
Well, it is the thing we wake up and think about first thing every single day and what, at the end of every single day, we are thinking about as we, you know, wrap up the workday. 

And it's frankly, you know, we're raising the alarm because the trends that we see are really unaffordable. They're unaffordable both for employers in our community but also for residents of our community who themselves have been asked over the last decade to pay more and more toward the cost of healthcare, and so we see this as a really profound societal challenge. We see this as a competitiveness issue for Massachusetts. We see it as a threat, frankly, to access to health care, and we're on a trajectory right now that is pretty concerning. So we'd had a little bit of a reprieve during COVID, not for good reasons. People couldn't actually access the care they needed, but it took some of the pressure off in terms of health care cost growth. We're now looking at health care cost trends. Pricewaterhousecoopers just came out with this study saying it's like they're projecting it's going to be about eight and a half percent. 

Well if you think about the growth in the economy right now, which is about 3%, we're now talking about a growth rate that is almost three times the growth rate in the overall economy. That's a problem. Here at Blue Cross and Mass we're seeing trend that's like 8% to 9% and I don't expect, I don't see anything as I look out over the next few years that gives me a lot of confidence that that trajectory is going to change. 

0:15:43 - David Williams
Yeah, affordability is always at least something people talked about. It is called the Affordable Care Act. After all. There have been some approaches beyond expanding coverage, like accountable care organizations, the whole overall value-based care, and there are programs on value-based care, including those that are provided by Blue Cross, blue Shield of Mass. Are those programs working? Is that an answer? 

0:16:06 - Sarah Iselin
So I think the way we pay for care has got to be a part of the answer. It has been a part of the answer in Massachusetts for a long time. So, given that we did start on this journey back in 2006 and made a very explicit and intentional decision to focus on coverage first and to not hold making progress on expanding access to health care hostage for our ability to make progress on the cost of healthcare and the affordability of healthcare, we always knew that we were going to have to tackle this, and we've been working on it. We've made some tremendous progress. We're fortunate both to be sitting in a state that has the highest adoption of value-based care. You talked about those other communities. 

I worked in Florida, both nationally when I was with United In Florida and in California. There's nowhere I've been that has a higher adoption of value-based care than here, and I'm proud of the role Blue Cross, blue Shield of Massachusetts, has played, advancing that in this state, though, we're by no means alone, but it's not enough, and so I'm optimistic that, if we continue to follow the blueprint that's worked so well for us as a community, where we come together as employers, as health plans, as providers, as physician leaders. If we come together as a community, that we'll be able to make more progress. But this next chapter is going to be harder than anything we've done yet, given the pressures that are the provider everybody's feeling, including hospitals and physician groups and really everybody who works in healthcare right now. 

0:17:33 - David Williams
Good, all right. Well, we'll have to follow up on that one once that one's conquered. We won't say the timeframe for that. 

0:17:40 - Sarah Iselin
Well, you have to be optimistic about this, Otherwise how could you get up and keep working on it every day? But it is a real challenge and I don't I actually haven't seen more of a challenging time, because it's all parts of the system that are hurting right now. I mean, there's no better example of that than just looking at what's going on with Steward and what all of the hospitals in those communities that are picking up the pieces are focused on right now so that we can make sure that people have access to affordable, high quality health care they need and deserve in this community. 

0:18:11 - David Williams
So let's talk about women's health, which has been one of your priorities. What are some of the key initiatives there and how do you look at it? It's kind of a funny thing because you say, well, most adults are women, so it's not like a niche thing really. 

0:18:24 - Sarah Iselin
At least half. At least half of us are women, and it's important for me to say it's also I'm not focusing on this just because I'm a woman, but it just so happens as an employer, almost three quarters of our workforce are women, and so, as a health plan, we're often thinking first about okay, well, we also buy healthcare coverage for our own employees. So what does our workforce need? And we've made a lot of progress actually understanding that women have different health care needs than men, but there's still a lot of stigma around parts of women's health. So, you know, I think about my mom, who's in her late 70s at this point. 

You know, way back when, like, pregnancy was actually kind of stigmatized, and I'm 53, I think in the early years, in my early reproductive years, you know, infertility was still something that you weren't really comfortable talking about. 

We made great progress destigmatizing that, but we have a lot more progress to make destigmatizing some of the other things that happen in women's reproductive years. You know, menopause or endometriosis. There are all of these other things that need attention, that need support, and so that's why we've made it a priority attention that needs support, and so that's why we've made it a priority, and we believe it's, you know, a differentiator for us, frankly, as an employer, to be able to create spaces where we can talk about this. So we've done things like webinars. We have an on-staff OBGYN and we do on-staff webinars and employee resource groups that are focused on things like menopause, and we're bringing on new solutions that actually support people in their reproductive healthcare journeys along with the end of their reproductive years. So we've just announced bringing Maven on board this summer as a virtual first option to help people through all of those kinds of challenges. And then we're also focused on things like reproductive health, even for same-sex couples. So we're thinking about all of these issues in lots of different ways. 

0:20:14 - David Williams
Great One thing that even back in the MassHealth Quality Partner Days they started to talk about was having an equitable health care system, and inequities is something that you see a lot of throughout the system. What is the role of Blue Cross in terms of recognizing and addressing those inequities? 

0:20:32 - Sarah Iselin
So one of the things I'm so proud of in this plan that I now have I can track my history of working in this company by the age of my oldest child, who just turned 23. 

And so I started working here at our foundation Right. I came back from maternity leave to the Blue Cross West Chiltern Massachusetts Foundation with Andrew Crossbow Shield and Massachusetts Foundation with Andrew I remember way back in those years. This has been a company that has been focused on equity forever and thinking about that through all the levers. So whether that was supplier diversity we had one of the earliest supplier diversity programs that I knew of. It's been something that we've talked about in terms of our workforce and our belief that the more diverse a workforce we have, a workforce that looks like our members in terms of race and ethnicity and age and political ideology and life experiences, that we'll make better decisions, we'll offer better health coverage, we'll provide better member support, and so we've now taken that to a whole other level, thinking about ourselves as a payer, and so I alluded earlier to value-based care, our particular brand, as we call ours, the Alternative Quality Contract. 

We are now, if not the first, one of the first health plans that is now incorporated into our quality measures health equity, and so we now have pretty much all of the major health systems in this state that contract with us through the AQC, the Alternative Quality Contract, are now being incentivized and rewarded for making progress on reducing health inequities in Massachusetts. So it's pretty exciting and we're doing that in a way where we want to advance this for the whole community. We don't view this as proprietary. So two weeks ago we just had a method session. We had 100 people from all over the country local government leaders, federal government leaders, other health plans, competitor health plans where we shared all the details about how we think about this, how we do this. So we come at this really as the right thing to do and using our platform as a payer to just try and make healthcare better. 

0:22:28 - David Williams
So let's talk about access, because we started off talking about cost. It seems to be a problematic topic. Costs are always going up. We've got, hopefully, good quality, there's a lot of providers around, but access is pretty tough, even for people that have health insurance. I've experienced it myself, even as an insider in the health care system. You mentioned, when talking about women's health, maybe new kinds of organizations like MAVEN. How do you think about dealing with access, both within the traditional provider networks and then any sort know any sort of expansions or changes that you might make to address that topic? 

0:23:03 - Sarah Iselin
Well, I want to acknowledge your point. I've experienced it too in terms of the access challenges and I generally you know, both of us probably know how to navigate the healthcare system very well. I actually like just navigating it as a regular person because it keeps you pretty clear about what are, you know, regular people who don't work in health care experiencing? And we're at a really tricky time. And even if we talk about MassHealth Quality Partners, I know they measure access and they measure it in different areas but including primary care. I know they've shared that they're seeing it and what they're measuring in terms of we really are at a time when there's reason to be concerned and then you layer on things like the you know the steward bankruptcy and their reasons to be even more concerned with hospital closures and other things. 

So our response to that has been to expand our network where we can. So I talked about, as you mentioned, bringing Maven in as a women's health provider, but we've also brought in virtual first primary care providers Firefly, carbon Health so we're inviting new people into our network in Massachusetts who have a lot of capacity in addition to all of the brands that we're used to seeing in places we're used to going in this state, and we're also doing that in specialties, but there's a lot more to do. I'm guessing that at some point you might ask me about behavioral health, but that's another place where we've really been focused, because that's been one of the places where the access problems are the most profound and concerning. 

0:24:33 - David Williams
Fair enough. Well, I'll ask you about it, since you teed it up and I've seen you've certainly seen that and there is the mental health parody has been a focus on podcasts that I do with John Driscoll. We interviewed Patrick Kennedy recently and he's been a big advocate there on behavioral health. 

0:24:52 - Sarah Iselin
Yep just found him, a few weeks ago. 

0:24:56 - David Williams
So how do you deal with it? There's just nowhere near enough providers, especially if we look at, say, you know, Gen Z. There's something like 40% of people have a mental health diagnosis. There's no way they're going to all get a provider. 

0:25:06 - Sarah Iselin
I don't think I'm the parent of three of them. So it's me. I am aware and and concerned and I, you know, I often share this with my kids' permissions. I mean, two of my three kids have behavioral health diagnoses and one of my kids, I mean I've been in the system with a kid who, I'm happy to say, is doing really well now, but there's nothing more. There's nothing that can level you more than you know, finding yourself as I have more than once in a psychiatric emergency room and a locked hold with your kid to make you realize that our behavioral health system is sure not a system. And you know, I and you know how to navigate this better than anybody else and it was a really, really hard, hard journey. So it's something that long before I got here that we've been focused on. 

So we did things like we carved in behavioral health. Some health plans actually subcontract out their behavioral health. More than a dozen years ago we brought that in-house and said people are whole people. You know there's no differentiation between the care you need above your chin and below and we need to treat people as whole people. So we did that, I don't know, like 14 years ago, but we've been focused on the last five years really on our network, and so we've actually expanded our network by about 50% in the last five years, because we know one of the challenges people see is they might find a provider who's taking patients but then they might find they don't take insurance. So I'm not saying we've solved the problem, but we've made an incredible amount of progress and we've also done things like bring some virtual first providers into the network, like Brightline, which is focused on kids and families, which has been a particular area of access challenge, and we know we have more work to do so we're not going to stop. 

Interestingly, demand is increasing significantly. People thought, you know, maybe we were looking at a behavioral health spike just during COVID. Well, it's higher now than even it was during COVID, and it's not just kids, it's adults too and it's actually now becoming a contributor. But I don't think it's a bad thing. It's a part of why our healthcare costs are going up is there's much higher use of behavioral health than there's been before. So that's a good thing and a bad thing. It means more people are finding access, but it's also contributing to why health care costs are going up. 

0:27:24 - David Williams
So let's talk about Steward Health Care. You mentioned them a couple of times and you know the origin of Steward. Part of it was that they're actually buying hospitals in more underserved communities. They had more of a Medicaid population, they're going to be lower cost and so on, and it hasn't really worked out that well, namely that they're in bankruptcy, closing hospitals, et cetera. 

0:27:51 - Sarah Iselin
What's your take on the Stewart situation and how do you contribute to trying to ameliorate the situation in the state amount? I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of members who have a relationship with Stuart in some way or another, with a primary care physician or a specialist, or have had a baby there or have had a procedure done there. We're also their health plan. So we have been, you know, in the thick of this from day one. What I can say is, you know, because the state has done such a great job communicating what's happening, we've been planning for this as a community for a while. So just huge kudos to Secretary Walsh and all the other leaders in the Healy administration. But it is deeply concerning and, you know, at a time when we've got real access challenges and capacity constraints and a lot of financial pressures in different parts of our healthcare system that are still emerging from the challenges posed by the pandemic and workforce challenges, this is a it's a. It's a big concern. 

So what are we doing? We're just communicating, communicating, communicating. So when we found out about the closure of the two of Carney and Neshoba Valley, you know we reached out. We literally were able to look in our all approved prior authorizations identify any of our members who we knew in the next month had a procedure scheduled at one of those hospitals. We picked up the phone and called them, yeah, and said we're here to support you. Um and uh. And so we have a whole other series of you know again outreach and communication um that we're doing to try to reach out and help people navigate the healthcare system in what is likely a you know concerning time for many, and then we'll work with whoever the new owners end up being to make sure that we get them in network quickly to make sure that people don't have disruptions in care, and we'll see what happens in the bankruptcy hearing that's just been rescheduled for Friday. 

0:29:39 - David Williams
Okay, very nice, Sarah. My last question for you is whether you've read any good books lately, or even in the past. Anything you'd like to recommend to our listeners? 

0:29:50 - Sarah Iselin
I try to always keep sort of a nonfiction and a fiction going at the same time. I just read the Women so on the fiction side it's fabulous by Kristen Hanna about nurses and the role of women in the Vietnam War. It was really really great, and I'm a big Adam Grant fan, and so one book I just would always recommend is Give and Take. So I've read it, I've reread it. It's just really a fantastic book and I sort of one of the things that I live by is really aspiring to be a giver. That's something I bring to work, you know, in my head every day. 

0:30:26 - David Williams
Great. Well, you know, not everybody's books are on theme and on point, but I think that's sort of wrapping up the interview about where we started it. So, sarah Iselin, president and CEO of Blue Cross, blue Shield of Massachusetts, thank you for joining me today on the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:30:41 - Sarah Iselin
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. 

0:30:44 - David Williams
You've been listening to the Health Biz Podcast with me, david Williams, president of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroup.com.