"In part one of this two-part ASCO Education Oncology, etc. podcast, hosts Patrick Loehrer and David Johnson chat with health policy and payment expert, pulmonary physician, epidemiologist and writer Dr. Peter Bach about his background and career. Dr. Bach, who created the Drug Abacus, shares his views on cancer drug pricing, based care, and health equity. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. Learn more at https://education.asco.org, or email us at education@asco.org."     Dr. Patrick Loehrer: Hi. I'm Pat Loehrer. I'm Professor of Medicine at Indiana University and Director of the Center for Global Oncology and Health Equity.    Dr. Dave Johnson: And hi. I'm Dave Johnson, Professor of Medicine at UT Southwestern in Dallas.    Dr. Patrick Loehrer: And this is Oncology, Etc. Welcome to the show. Dave, what have you been reading. There's a book that we chatted about earlier that I think might tie in today's discussion. It was called About Alice. And we both had a chance to read that book. I've met Calvin Trillin.    Dr. Dave Johnson: Yeah. We read it a few years ago. I think I recall us being at a meeting in San Francisco, and you mentioned the book to me. And actually, Calvin was a guest and a speaker at that particular meeting, so we both got a chance to have our copies autographed by him. It was an amazing book.    Dr. Patrick Loehrer: Yeah, just for the listeners, Calvin Trillin is a wonderful writer for The New Yorker, and his wife had cancer, had treated, and unfortunately developed complications in that. And this was kind of a memoir to this. One of the things I love is when they first met, they met at a cocktail party, and Alice was just stunningly beautiful—there's a picture of her in the book—and Calvin is not. He looks like Dave and I combined. But their eyes glanced, and in the book, he talks about the fact, years later, Alice said to Calvin, “You have never been as funny as you were that night.” And Calvin says, “You mean I peaked in December of 1963?” And Alice goes, “I'm afraid so.” So that resonates with me a lot, actually. But Dave, why don't you introduce Peter?    Dr. Dave Johnson: Yeah, happy to do so. It's been terrific to have him on today. Peter is a health policy and payment expert, pulmonary physician and lung cancer epidemiologist. He's a true Renaissance man. Peter spent nearly a quarter of a century at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, where he served as director of the Center of Health Policy and Outcomes. He has devoted his career to repairing defects in the healthcare delivery system that impede access to high-quality cancer care, and working to ameliorate healthcare cost crises. His work spans seminal studies, including the identification of racial gaps in lung cancer care, the development of the first lung cancer risk prediction model, lead authorship on multiple lung cancer screening guidelines, and definitional work on pharmaceutical pricing and value.    Last year at about this time actually, Peter moved to become the Chief Medical Officer of Delphi Diagnostics, a developer of blood tests for early detection of multiple types of cancer. Peter received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and medical degree from the University of Minnesota. He then took internal medicine training at Johns Hopkins, followed by a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care at the University of Chicago, where he served as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation clinical scholar.    Along with his prolific scientific writing, Peter is a regular contributor to The New York Times and other newspapers. He is a frequent but fair critic of pharmaceutical drug pricing in cancer and a staunch advocate for value-based drug pricing. In addition, he has written extensively on a number of personal and provocative topics ranging from the death of his wife, medical school tuition funding, to setting physician reimbursement based on market forces.    Not surprisingly, he's amassed a number of accolades