In a Jerusalem Post podcast, FINN Partners global health chair Gil Bashe said Israeli health innovators could be surprised to find that in the US, a lower price tag can sometimes slow adoption rather than speed it, and that winning in America required aligning clinical value with the realities of reimbursement, intermediaries, and trust.
Bashe, a managing partner and global health and purpose chair at FINN Partners, described his firm as a “community” and a “conduit” that helps bring Israeli innovation to global markets. In the conversation with Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Zvika Klein, Bashe argued that communications was only one part of the challenge. He said the larger task was creating the conditions for success in a fragmented system where many decision-makers, and many incentives, stood between a promising product and a patient.
The next level
Bashe said FINN Partners’ work went far beyond what many people assume public relations means. Instead of focusing only on earned media, he described an approach built on ecosystem building, connecting Israeli companies to patient advocacy organizations, clinicians, thought leaders, and the payer community that ultimately determines whether a new device, diagnostic, or therapy is covered.
The US health system, he said, differed sharply from Israel’s more centralized structure. In the American environment, a physician’s enthusiasm did not necessarily translate into payment. Bashe pointed to the influence of Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers, and the layers of intermediaries that shape purchasing and coverage decisions. For founders arriving from Israel with strong science and good intentions, he said, the first shock was often discovering how much of US healthcare operated through economic structures that rewarded continuity.
Bashe illustrated the “cheaper can lose” paradox with an example from a medical device company that tried to enter the market with a low, accessible price. The company expected a modest price point to remove barriers and accelerate uptake. Instead, Bashe said it faced pressure from benefits intermediaries to raise the list price dramatically. The reasoning, he explained, was incentive-based. Some players in the system profited from negotiating discounts off a high initial price, a model often tied to spreads, rebates, or percentage-based savings. A product priced low from the start could offer less room for those mechanics, which meant less motivation for intermediaries to push it through the system.
Instinct and innovation
For Israeli firms, Bashe said, the lesson was not to abandon the instinct to innovate, but to build a reimbursement and market-access strategy early, alongside clinical validation. He framed his role, and his firm’s role, as strategic advising that educated innovators about the US market’s status quo bias and helped them translate scientific promise into the language payers and providers actually used.
The podcast also turned to the media landscape. Klein and Bashe discussed how social media had accelerated fragmentation, with journalists increasingly leaving legacy outlets to create niche platforms built around their persona and followership. Bashe said this trend pushed organizations to become omnichannel and more recognizable in voice, particularly for a younger, TikTok-era audience, while still protecting credibility and standards.
Bashe also spoke about his forthcoming book, Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter, which he said was expected to be released in January. He described the project as an attempt to move beyond critiques of US healthcare and toward practical pathways for reform, built around the idea that medicine should return to focusing on the whole person, not only transactions and specialized silos. He also described his approach to AI as “augmented implementation,” meaning technology could support decision-making, but human oversight and responsibility had to remain central.
Against the backdrop of the October 7 massacre and its aftermath, Klein raised a challenge Israeli companies were increasingly facing, pressure to obscure their Israeli identity in certain markets. Bashe said the internet made such efforts largely futile, and he advised a different approach: focus on the mission in a way that transcended politics.
Bashe said Israeli innovators should ground their message in three pillars: the unmet patient need being addressed, validated peer-reviewed science, and empowering health professionals to improve outcomes. That, he argued, was the most effective way to counter BDS-style mindsets without being pulled into political arguments. When the conversation centered on saving lives, he said, many stakeholders would ultimately prioritize care over ideology.
Bashe offered a balanced outlook. He said some Israeli firms would face friction and disappointment, but he argued that major US health entities remained focused on providing the best possible care. If an innovation was truly valuable, he said, decision-makers would deploy it, regardless of where it originated.
Relocating to the US could be a smart move for strategic reasons, Bashe added, such as proximity to customers and partners. But moving solely to escape the post-October 7 climate, he said, was not a strategy on its own. He closed by reaffirming his belief in the Israeli market’s potential to improve global well-being, describing Israel as a “nation of possibility” driven by tikkun olam (healing the world), and framing the work as derek eretz (proper conduct), doing the right thing because lives were at stake.