Weekend Listens: Past the Headline

Weekend Listens: Past the Headline

Three markets, three stories everyone thinks they know. Employers cover the weight loss drugs now. The grid is running out of power. Retail is dying. In each case the number that decides the outcome sits a layer below the headline.

1. Coverage on paper, no drug in hand

Off the Chart: A Business of Medicine Podcast, S1 Ep176: Cutting the PBM out of your patient's GLP-1, with Jay Bregman, founder and CEO of Andel.

Why listen: a plan covering a drug and a patient getting that drug turn out to be nearly unrelated events. Bregman puts real access, even on plans that cover GLP-1s, under 2% of members.

• The model: buy brand drugs from the manufacturer, sell to employers, carve the category out of the traditional plan. No insurer or pharmacy benefit manager in between, and in his words no utilization management, no prior authorizations, no formularies, and no rebates.
• The employer pays a set contribution per fill, as little as $100. Scripts route through his own pharmacy, so nothing changes at the prescriber's desk.
• The part he does not dodge: when the contribution stops, the price stops with it. Portability between jobs is a roadmap item, not a feature.

On the system he is routing around: "People just give up. I mean, nobody gets access to these drugs."

2. Two years to build a data center, seventeen to build the wire

POLITICO Energy, Inside America's coming electricity crunch with the NERC CEO, with Jim Robb, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

Why listen: NERC has issued three level 3 alerts in about 30 years. One is about large loads on the grid, and Robb walks through what it asks of utilities.

• The risk is behavior, not just size. Data centers run flat around the clock and are unusually sensitive to power quality.
• A Virginia event weeks before taping: one voltage fluctuation, three gigawatts of data center load gone at once, across many sites that all reacted the same way.
• His planning figure: roughly 200 gigawatts of new capacity over five to seven years, about half of it data centers, the rest reshored industry and electrification.
• The mismatch that worries him. Data centers get commissioned in two to three years. He cites a Southwest transmission line that took 17.

On storage: "Batteries aren't power plants. They're time machines."

3. The retail apocalypse that keeps paying rent

The TreppWire Podcast, 415. The Retail Story Everyone Gets Wrong, with Jim Dillavou, co-founder and principal at Paragon Commercial Group.

Why listen: Dillavou left a law firm after the crisis to buy grocery anchored centers when nobody wanted them. Treating retail as one asset class is a category error, he argues, and headlines get priced that way.

• The bankruptcy story runs on the front page. The follow up, where those boxes get backfilled at higher rents, does not. Failures here rarely surprise anyone following the credit.
• His example: a Big Lots anchored center in Orange County, re-tenanted with a grocer. Rent under $10 a foot became north of $30, and the whole center repriced.
• Why capital cannot get in now. Institutions let their retail specialists go, assets are small, occupancy sits above 95%.
• The COVID inversion nobody underwrote: mom and pop tenants paid, credit tenants asked for relief.

On weak tenants: "we love buying retailers that we think are failing."

Weekend Listens:

• Off the Chart: A Business of Medicine Podcast, Jay Bregman of Andel, S1 Ep176 (Aug 13).
• POLITICO Energy, NERC CEO Jim Robb with host Arianna Skibell (Aug 17).
• The TreppWire Podcast, Jim Dillavou of Paragon Commercial Group, EP.415 (Aug 18).