In-Woo Park Says The Biggest Healthcare Problem Is The Advice Layer Nobody Sees

The public fight over pharmacy benefit managers has finally moved into the center of the healthcare conversation. For In-Woo Park, that scrutiny is overdue, but it does not answer the question that pulled him deeper into the industry: if better options already exist, why do so many employers still miss them?

“That was the question I could not let go of,” Park said. “If there are better vendors in the market, and employers can save meaningful money by switching, why is the system still moving so slowly?”

Park is the founder and CEO of Fidaris, a software company building the platform for the next generation of health insurance brokerages. His work focuses on employer health benefits, but his larger concern is the layer of advice that sits between employers and the healthcare decisions they make for their workers.

To Park, pharmacy benefits are a great example in which current PBM scrutiny is real and necessary. Three companies control roughly 80 percent of America’s prescription drug claims: OptumRx, owned by UnitedHealth, Express Scripts, owned by Cigna, and Caremark, owned by CVS, which also owns Aetna. For years, PBMs operated as opaque middlemen between drug manufacturers, employers, and patients. Now, according to Park, that wall is starting to come down.

Recent action has been significant. The FTC reached a landmark settlement with Express Scripts in February 2026, requiring a 10-year set of operational reforms and reducing patient out-of-pocket costs for drugs such as insulin by up to $7 billion over a decade. Park also points to ongoing FTC enforcement against OptumRx and Caremark, Congressional reforms signed in February 2026, a Department of Labor proposed rule around PBM fee disclosure to employer health plans, and state-level reforms in Arkansas, Alabama, and elsewhere.

“All of this is overdue,” Park said. “PBMs had too much room to operate without employers and patients fully understanding where the money was going.”

But Park does not believe PBM reform is enough. His view is sharper than that. The industry already has many transparent, cost-effective PBMs and alternative vendors. Employers who switch to them can save 15 to 60 percent on annual drug spend, according to Park, sometimes while improving the experience for covered members. For a mid-sized employer, that can mean millions of dollars every year.

The innovation exists. The problem is that it does not always reach the employer.

“That is the part almost nobody talks about,” Park said. “The issue is not that better options do not exist. The issue is that employers often do not get a clean path to those options.”

Park believes the advice layer is where the system gets stuck. Employers rely on brokers, consultants, and advisors to help them choose health plans, PBMs, and other benefits vendors. Those advisors can have enormous influence over which options reach the table. Yet, in most cases, Park says the same advisors are financially connected to the incumbent PBMs and carriers they are supposed to evaluate. That creates a basic question of conflict.

“If the advisor is paid by the employer and also paid by the vendor being evaluated, the employer should know that,” Park said. “Otherwise, how can the employer understand whose incentives are shaping the recommendation?”

One example stayed with Park. A 9,000-employee employer paid its broker $175,000 a year. That same broker was receiving $1.6 million a year from a large PBM. To Park, the imbalance raises the question many employers may not know to ask: who is the broker really working for?

He is careful not to argue that every broker is the same. In fact, his work is built around the belief that many brokerages want to do the right thing and that the best firms are already working with a more fiduciary model or moving towards it. Those firms work in the employer’s interest and want to give better advice, but the shift is operationally hard.

“Some of the best people in this industry are trying to move in the right direction,” Park said. “The problem is that the work required to give deeper, unconflicted advice is much heavier than the old model.”

That is where Fidaris enters the story. The company is not simply about applying AI to insurance brokering because AI is fashionable. Park is building infrastructure for brokerages that want to scale capacity while doing more detailed, employer-centered work. In his view, the firms that genuinely work in the employer’s best interest will be the ones that win over the next decade, but they need systems that make that transition possible.

“Fiduciary brokerages need more than good intent,” Park said. “They need the workflows and infrastructure to compete on capacity without compromising depth.”

Park came to this issue after working across several corners of healthcare, including pharmacy, antimicrobial research, medtech, and health-tech. That path eventually pushed him into a deeper study of U.S. healthcare accessibility and the way money moves through the system. He read long contracts, examined large claims datasets, studied rebate flows, and spoke with brokers, consultants, ERISA attorneys, PBM founders, and other operators. Many of those people are now advisors or pilot partners to Fidaris.

“I am still learning, but I wanted to understand the system from first principles,” Park said. “Once you start following the money and the decisions, the advice layer becomes impossible to ignore.”

That outsider status has shaped his view. Park is new to insurance brokering, and he sees that as an advantage because he did not enter with inherited assumptions about what the industry can or cannot become. Instead, he embedded himself in brokerage environments, studied how work actually gets done, and learned the language of the people he hopes Fidaris can support.

“You cannot change an industry by standing outside it and guessing,” Park said. “I had to understand how brokerages operate day to day, not just how the business looks from a distance.”

His goal now is larger than Fidaris alone. Park wants to help build the infrastructure that allows more brokerages to make a fiduciary transition, provide higher-quality unconflicted advice, and create a positive ripple effect for employers and, eventually, patients.

He believes that is where the most overlooked healthcare opportunity sits. PBM reform may reduce some of the opacity. Better vendors may keep emerging. But unless employers receive advice that points them toward the right options, innovation will keep moving slower than it should.

“Healthcare is not only broken because there is not enough innovation,” Park said. “A lot of the innovation is already here. The problem is that the information gets trapped before it reaches the buyer.”

For Park, fixing that path is the work. The next generation of health plans may depend not only on better vendors but on better advice reaching the employers who choose them. For more information on In-Woo Park, visit his LinkedIn.