5SR - December 8, 2023

Hitha on CVS' drug pricing plan, restoring coral reefs, and decorating your home like a Hallmark movie

Author

Hitha Palepu
December 08, 2023

Today’s curator is the founder of #5SmartReads, Hitha Palepu. She’s a consummate multihyphenate - CEO of Rhoshan Pharmaceuticals, author of WE’RE SPEAKING: The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris and How to Pack: Travel Smart for Any Trip, and professional speaker. Hitha is an unabashed fan of Taco Bell, Philadelphia sports teams & F1, romance novels, and is a mediocre crafter. She lives in NYC with her husband and two sons.

The Debate That Israel Needs Over the War (New York Times)
*article gifted via my New York Times subscription

No commentary for this one - just please take the time to read it.

Madeleine Dore is one of my favorite writers, and her Substack is always filled with thoughtful gems on living a more intentional life.

I’m someone who usually has no problem starting something, but I usually flame out or pivot or abandon it entirely because something else caught my attention - and I do beat myself about it.

Dore’s suggestions on beginning things differently - and how she approached it with her new podcast and newsletter - is a beautiful read. Given that the beginning of a new year comes with lofty expectations of overhauling your life, I encourage you to take Dore’s advice and start in a space of nothingness and ease into your next big thing.

It’s very heartening to see a major pharmacy like CVS adopt Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs approach and shift the way they price and generate revenue on prescription drugs, and how they’re implementing this across the enterprise - within their PBM CVS Caremark and their insurer Aetna.

It’s a highly reactive move, coming on the heels of CVS losing huge PBM contracts to Amazon and Cuban’s company. But it’s an impactful move, given CVS’ national scale and its presence throughout the supply chain.

There’s a lot more in this primer, which I highly recommend you read in full. Progress is an winding path that has as many setback as it forges onward, and I think this is a heartening move that I hope accelerates lowering the cost of medication for everyone who needs it.

Having watched at least 10 Hallmark movies with my father over the past week and half, I want to move into one of these movies with a cup of cocoa, a festive sweater, perfect bouncy curls, and in the most festive home.

Now, I finally know how to get the home, thanks to this interview with the production designer behind The Holiday Sitter and Time For Him to Come Home for Christmas. And it’s not just about how a room looks - it’s the whole sensorial vibe, from scent to sound to specific color choices and homemade touches.

Quite literally on he last part - the team made the stockings and decorations for some of the sets, which has me searching for Christmas crafts to do with the boys and thinking about the ambitious task of stitching needlepoint stockings for each of us.

In the meantime, I’ve swapped our black tapers for red ones and replaced faux fall florals for faux holly and evergreen. I have my candle lamps warming Chalet and Holiday all day long, and the Philly Specials’ albums play on a loop.

Coral reef restoration is my Roman Empire (well, one of them). And it’s one climate crisis we have the tools to solve right now, and I love reading out leaders who are doing just that.

Take Titouan Bernicot, the founder and CEO of Coral Gardeners (who started this company when he was 18 years old). Today, the organization is one of the most impactful in revitalizing reefs through coral gardening, and it’s truly impressive and hopeful:

“Today, Coral Gardeners is the most advanced, most followed coral reef restoration and conservation project on the planet. We just opened a nursery in Fiji and are opening locations in Thailand and Puerto Rico soon. We have a team of 50 full-time employees, including six marine biologists. They’re the same type of people who told me the only way for me to work with the reef was to become a scientist. We also have two engineers from Tesla, one from SpaceX, and one from Microsoft—and I hired a lot of my childhood friends to be actual coral gardeners, because fishermen are closely connected to reef ecosystems; they need them to survive. We really value their knowledge, which comes from generations of working in the water. Supporting local communities is at the heart of what we do.”

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