{"id":677059,"date":"2026-06-01T02:13:47","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T02:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/677059\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T02:13:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T02:13:47","slug":"there-are-no-perfect-decisions-with-healthcare-virta-health-cfo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/677059\/","title":{"rendered":"There are no \u2018perfect decisions\u2019 with healthcare: Virta Health CFO"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This story was originally published on CFO Dive<\/a>. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CFO Dive newsletter<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The cost of healthcare has increased over the past few years, pushed up by broad inflationary pressure and the introduction of new categories of medicine such as GLP-1 drugs<\/a>, which every month can cost between $936 and $1,023, according to reports.<\/p>\n

CFOs who aim to navigate such rising expenses and develop attractive healthcare plans for their employees first need to answer, \u201cWhat am I willing to live with in totality?\u201d Manu Diwakar, CFO of metabolic health platform Virta Health said. \u201cAnd then that becomes my top end of my budget, on a per employee basis, or on a total basis, this is how much I want to spend on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Figuring out that cost envelope is crucial as employers balance rising healthcare costs against the long-term needs and goals of the business. Finance chiefs are \u201cultimately responsible for the financial health of the company,\u201d Diwakar told CFO Dive. \u201cAnd if any of your costs are going up by more your business performance can bear, you immediately enter a conversation on how to rationalize or contain that cost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asking the hard questions <\/p>\n

As healthcare expenses grow, companies are faced with making a difficult decision \u2014 \u201chow much of that cost are they going to cover versus how much of the cost are they pushing onto their employees,\u201d Diwakar said.<\/p>\n

Currently, with interest rates rising to the highest level in years, \u201cI think you have to really ask yourself what you get by being better or more generous to your employees,\u201d Diwakar said. \u201cAnd I think in that environment, costs are spiking. People are asking themselves some really, really hard questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diwakar has served as CFO for Virta Health, a Denver, Col.-based telehealth and metabolic health provider, since 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has served part-time as a managing partner for S7 Ventures, an investment platform focused on the tech and healthcare spaces, since January 2019. Prior to Virta, he held CFO roles at Kaia Health and Ceres, an agriculture-focused data and analytics platform.<\/p>\n

To answer those hard questions, it\u2019s important for finance chiefs to work closely with other key executives, such as the head of the people team and head of the benefits or human resources team, to determine not just the totality of costs but where efficiencies can be found.<\/p>\n

For instance, at one of Diwakar\u2019s previous companies, one of the things the team discovered after looking at its healthcare benefits was that while the organization was generous with employee health coverage, they were \u201cvery terrible on spousal and children coverage, so more of the healthcare cost was being borne by the folks with families or the folks who had spouses,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The business brought down the premiums for spouses or children, but in order to do so, they had to raise the cost of per-employee coverage, he said.<\/p>\n

No perfect decisions <\/p>\n

Changing norms within healthcare, such as the rise of artificial intelligence and the growing popularity of new medication categories such as GLP-1s \u2014 which treat metabolic conditions such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease as well as targeting weight loss \u2014 are further complicating employers\u2019 coverage decisions.<\/p>\n

According to a March 26 article by the National Conference of State Legislatures, over 12% of adults are currently taking a GLP-1 drug \u2014 and while most say their insurance covers<\/a> at least some of the cost, 53% say the cost-sharing amount remains too high.<\/p>\n

Providing coverage for those diseases and enabling treatment is \u201cmorally the right thing to do, and it also is the most cost-effective thing to do,\u201d Diwakar said. However, the \u201cthe complicating factor ends up becoming, how much money are you willing to spend to do that, and who’s experiencing the benefit?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

To put the question a different way, if an employee remains with a company for a two-year period, for example, \u201cand you’re spending a lot of money to make them healthy for the rest of their lives, for a single business from a dollars and cents perspective, it ends up becoming the wrong thing to do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For an employee who remains with a company for decades \u2014 such as Diwaker\u2019s father, who spent his career at General Motors \u2014 \u201cit makes 100% sense to make sure somebody’s healthy forever,\u201d he said. The \u201cethical imperative, the health imperative, and the financial incentive all aligned really clearly.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a CFO, therefore, \u201cyou\u2019ve got to think a lot about what kind of workforce you want to encourage, how you think about retention, how you think about attracting talented employees,\u201d Diwakar said. That decision becomes very different depending on the size of the company, the state of the economy and the stage of the company itself, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you have to realize there’s no perfect decision,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re going to create a problem somewhere, you just have to own up to what it is, and then figure out how to deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story was originally published on CFO Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":677060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[34124,63717,97,252,253,295270,28422,197922,295269,295268],"class_list":["post-677059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-cfo","tag-financial-health","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-healthcare-benefits","tag-healthcare-costs","tag-healthcare-expenses","tag-manu-diwakar","tag-virta-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/677060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}