Episodes

20 exam windows invalidated. Roughly 150 graduates who thought they had a job in September now retaking a national certification exam. And a workforce gap between CRNAs and anesthesiologists that's up to 11,000 and accelerating. Joe Rodriguez sits down with Randy Moore and Tracy Young, three days into Tracy's term as president of his professional association. They don't agree on all of it. That's the point. The docket opens with the CAA certification crisis: what NCCAA found, why Tracy says the CRNA community shouldn't take a victory lap, and what it means for hospitals already stretched thin. From there, Randy walks through the supply and demand curves reshaping the locums market, Tracy lays out the data on the widening CRNA-anesthesiologist gap, and both agree a locums company bubble is forming, even if they disagree on the timeline. The sharpest moment of the episode: Randy makes the case that anesthesia groups have spent years selling themselves as a cost to minimize instead…

USAP allegedly paid a competitor $9 million to stay out of the Dallas market. A Texas teachers' pension system says it's paying twice the going rate for anesthesia because of it. Joe Rodriguez (Chief Growth Officer, Guide Anesthesia) is joined by Tracy Young (COO, Essential Anesthesia) and Gary Keeling (VP, Anesthesia Services at Coronis Health) to unpack the USAP consolidation fallout, why anesthesia pay works the way it does, and the debt mechanics behind CHG Healthcare's acquisition of Krewe Anesthesia. First: Representative Tom Oliverson's Houston Chronicle testimony and the Texas Teacher Retirement System's claim that USAP charges double the going rate, including the allegation that USAP paid Envision $9 million to stay out of the Dallas market entirely. Tracy makes the business case for what USAP did before making the ethics case against how they did it. Second: why anesthesiologists and CRNAs actually get paid what they get paid, and why "fair" isn't a market principle de…