Dr. Steve Borene is an anesthesiologist with more than 20 years in practice, a Marine Corps veteran, and the co-founder and CEO of Renovo Health, a direct-pay surgery and medical infusion center in Wisconsin that posts, bundles, and holds its prices. He knows legacy hospital systems from two decades of practice inside them, holds a master's degree in healthcare delivery science from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and co-leads the Wisconsin chapter of the Free Market Medical Association. Patients and employers rarely see what drives the price of a procedure, from administrative overhead to the incentives of every party standing between them and their care. This conversation follows Steve's path from hospital operating rooms to a surgery center that quotes prices 60% below legacy systems, including the canceled pre-op EKG that showed him how much of the system runs on revenue generation. He explains where Renovo's savings come from and why keeping fewer parties at the table leaves less room for hidden incentives and under-the-table deals. As the funders of care, employers hold the money and the influence to steer patients, and Steve makes the case for using both. Listeners walk away knowing why direct-pay care costs less and how employers can give their people a reason to choose it. In this episode A self-pay patient who could save more than $10,000 by waiting one more week for her procedure at Renovo, and a man whose employer refused to cover a $3,000 pain procedureA treatment one company pays over $40,000 a month for, against Renovo's offer of under $2,000, and the case for sharing those savings with the patient.How buying a surgery center and firing the administrators cut costs by two-thirdsCopying competing medication suppliers on the same email and switching a general surgeon to a trocar that costs $6,000 lessRebates, kickbacks, TPAs, brokers, and care navigators paid a percentage, and how to find partners with nothing to hideWorking with about 180 employers and reaching hundreds of thousands of lives through partner groupsA canceled pre-op EKG, two weeks of follow-up emails, and the trip to Dr. Keith Smith's Surgery Center of Oklahoma that led to RenovoAccounting for every cost with patients, down to the $50,000 lights in the operating roomMoral injury among physicians and why "I don't know what it costs" sounds to patients like "I don't care" The Price of Healthcare podcast is produced by the team at Payerset. 📖 GET THE 2026 PRICE TRANSPARENCY FIELD GUIDE Practical tips and lessons for healthcare finance leaders and analysts leveraging price transparency data.➡️ https://payerset.com/pricetransparencyproject/ 📊 USE OUR EMPLOYER RATE INTELLIGENCE TOOL See what an employer health plan really pays➡️ https://payerset.com/employer-rate-intelligence/ 🔔 KEEP LEARNING WITH THE PRICE OF HEALTHCARE PODCAST Subscribe to this channel for latest news and knowledge in healthcare finance. 🤝 CONNECT WITH PAYERSET ON LINKEDIN ➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/company/payerset
