“If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” This may be what White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought thought when he ordered mass layoffs and firings of federal workers when the government shutdown began, but a federal court put a stop to all of that positive thinking. Instead, this quote is actually one of the great lines in Back to the Future, which is appropriate on this day when we dress up for Halloween. In the spirit of the holiday, we are remembering when positive thinking led every little kid to dream about being an astronaut (or making a time machine out of a DeLorean) and getting the costume to match. This throwback to the past, when people still thought anything was possible, is the subject of the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
Other news that is more about the future than the past:
- At its Global Technology Conference, NVIDIA made several announcements, including partnerships with Eli Lilly to build the largest AI supercomputer for scientific discovery, Palantir to accelerate AI integration in enterprise and government workflows, and Verily to improve genomic data processing.
- On Wednesday, October 29, 2025, the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing titled “The Future of Biotech: Maintaining U.S. Competitiveness and Delivering Lifesaving Cures to Patients.”
- Patient experience and digital health are increasingly high priorities for hospital executives. Many report they are still struggling to measure any ROI on virtual care programs, according to a Sage Growth Partners report.
“Marty, I’m sorry, but the only power source capable of generating 1.21 jigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning.” I have been thinking a lot about Doc Brown’s quote from Back to the Future with all of the companies announcing they will create their own power grids to garner enough electricity (10 gigawatts) to power the AI infrastructure necessary for our tech-fueled future. The movie is instructive because rather than giving up, Marty and Doc get creative and figure out how to harness a bolt of lightning. Similar acts of creativity are going to be required to save our crumbling health care infrastructure for the most vulnerable in our society. Enter a flash from the past who promises to get us back to the future: Dan Brillman, the new leader of the Medicaid program. This all-American boy—lacrosse player, student of Yale and Columbia Business School, fighter pilot, and son of a successful entrepreneur mommy who took him on customer visits at nursing homes—is going to use his “Unite Us” experience to make the impossible possible in the Medicaid program. Dan Brillman is so old school that he WROTE A PAPER about how to help his military buddies who had trouble getting the services they needed post-Iraq War tours. The paper launched the Unite Us organization, which built a unified network of health and social services for those in need, military and beyond. Unite Us is one of the few organizations actually taking steps to address the social determinants of health rather than just examining the problem. Is this guy for real? Can he weirdly cut through the CMS bureaucracy like few people have before to transform the Medicaid program, with less resources than they’ve ever had? Sometimes it is hard to imagine the future, like when the 1950’s-era Doc Brown reacts incredulously to Marty’s news that Ronald Reagan, a B-movie actor, becomes president in the 1980s: “Then who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?” Um…no, but we may need another movie to explain that one.
