0 (2s):
Boom shake the room, Fire Nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Science of Scaling. Today we'll be breaking down freedom from health insurance. To drop these value bombs, I brought Andy Schoonover into EOFire Studios. Andy is the founder and CEO of CrowdHealth, a company founded to give people the tools to free themselves from the tyranny of health insurance. And today Fire Nation, we will be talking about the right tools with health insurance, the wrong tools, cash pay, getting to better rates, and we'll also talk about a viable alternative to health insurance and so much more.

0 (44s):
And a big thank you for sponsoring today’s episode goes to Andy and our Sponsors, the Gold Digger podcast, hosted by my good friend, Jenna Kutcher is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business acts, inspirational stories, and so much more. A must listen episode is one of Jenna's recents on everything you need to know about affiliate marketing. Listen to Gold Digger, wherever you get your podcasts ever thought of giving a TEDx talk, it's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. In four time TEDx, speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought-Leader can help you get there.

0 (1m 25s):
Visit Thought-Leader.com/fire to join Taylor's free trading, where he teaches you how to land a TEDx Talk and spread your message to millions Andy say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 45s):
Hear me out on this one. So I went to Stanford for business school and I'm looking at the top 20, maybe even 30 classmates of mine in my class, by the way, I was probably in the bottom 20 or 30. And ultimately what I think is that entrepreneurship and intelligence is inversely correlated or negatively correlated. So, so again, hear, hear me out on this one, the top 20 or 30 members of my class who are wickedly smart, wickedly smart, they're crushing it in the land of status quo. They are bankers, they're consultants, they are making millions of dollars a year crushing it in the status quo, but it's the middle and the lower end of my class that are all the entrepreneurs.

1 (2m 33s):
And so as a why is that, that's the big question that I've been asking myself. And I think it's, it's two reasons. One is these people are so smart that they see things that we don't, reasons why businesses won't succeed. That if we solve them we probably wouldn't do what we're doing. You know, there's, there's a million reasons why these things don't work, right. I think the second one is entrepreneurship is just a series of failures that hopefully culminate in a success. And many of these people have been getting, a's they get on every test they've taken, they've gotten the perfect SAT scores. Failure is not an option. So I think there is a, a level in which, sure, you need to be intelligence, maybe average or above average intelligence to be an entrepreneur.

1 (3m 19s):
But beyond that, I think it actually hurts you. I don't think very many people agree with that. So that's my, that's my addition to, to your, your wonderful question.

0 (3m 29s):
Well, thank you. And, and it's really interesting because I've interviewed now over 4,300 Entrepreneurs in the past 11 years. And so many of them, and I mean so many of them have said, you know what, John, if I had any idea, even a clue about what it was going to take to succeed as an entrepreneur, I never, never, never would've started. So to your point, a lot of these really top echelon, smartest of the smart people, they kind of probably know a lot of that already. And they're like, well, I actually know what these other semi ignorant people did not know. And that's why I'm not even gonna start down that path. But I'm taking the more safe, secure routes where I'm not going to fail.

0 (4m 11s):
I'm not gonna have a blemish on my record, but as us entrepreneurs say, ignorance is a bliss baby. And how do you like me? Now, ignorance

1 (4m 18s):
Is bliss.

0 (4m 19s):
Ignorance

1 (4m 20s):
Is bliss. And and who knows, maybe they'll do a, a Harvard Business School case study on that. Some, some, some at some point. So maybe

0 (4m 29s):
This episode will Spark that, that that'll maybe Spark somebody to, to do something along those lines. 'cause it really is interesting in Fire Nation, we're talking to the CEO of CrowdHealth and we're talking about freedom from health insurance. And now an issue that many people have dealt with is with the perverse incentives that health insurance has, you know, when they fight us, when we have this healthcare issue 'cause of these perverse incentives I just mentioned. So can you kind of talk about how this world works in a very perverse incentive manner?

1 (5m 4s):
Yeah, it's, it's perverse, you know, I, I I say it pretty simply like this, you know, obviously The sellers of healthcare, which are big hospital systems, primarily want the price to go up. That one's, that one's pretty obvious, but what most people don't understand is the buyers of healthcare, which are the insurance plans, actually also want the price to go up. And so why is that? Well, think about it this way. There was legislation within the last decade that forced the health insurance plans to max out their profits at 15% of premiums. So you can walk through the math of that, right? A thousand dollars premium, they can make $150.

1 (5m 46s):
Well, most of these are for-profit publicly traded entities. And so how do you go from $150 increase that by 10% to get to $165? Well, you have to see your premiums increase. And so you actually have, they're actually incentivized for prices to go up over time. And so in essence, what you have here is you have the buyers of, of healthcare health plans, The sellers of healthcare hospital systems, both wanting the price to go up. And so what do you get the prices going up? And that's a very simplistic way of looking at it, but that is in essence what is happening. The system is right with just perverse incentives that create, you know, never ending rises in healthcare costs.

1 (6m 32s):
That's ultimately what's going on here.

0 (6m 34s):
Now, one topic that I'm really excited to chat with you about is the fact that you believe that health insurance is unnecessary with the right tools. Can you share more?

1 (6m 45s):
Yeah, you know, I'm one of those few people out there that think that being uninsured is better. It's more freeing. You can go to wherever you want. And you know, in, in essence, what I, I think is that if we were able to operate, like we operated before 1970, which is when the legislation came into effect that basically, you know, legalized the current way in which we acquire health, our healthcare in this country, then we'd be better off. And what was happening before the 1970s? Well, primarily people were, you know, paying for their healthcare, you know, out of pocket. And that kept market forces operating.

1 (7m 26s):
So if you have market forces, if the buyer and the seller of a product agree to a price, then there is a, you know, a, a market force that keeps driving those prices down. Because if a profit gets too high, then you know, somebody enters the market. This is economics 1 0 1. Well, economics 1 0 1 was pitched out in the 1970s with the HMO Act, which, like I said, it, it, it codified our existing system. So I'm actually thinking that you should be uninsured. You have a lot more power that way. And so people think that's crazy. You know, these UnitedHealthcare is a $400 billion company. One out of every 10 healthcare dollars goes through UnitedHealthcare. Well, UnitedHealthcare comes to Austin, Texas was where, where I live, and there's two hospital systems.

1 (8m 12s):
UnitedHealthcare has to have both of those hospital systems to operate in, in Austin because everybody wants access to both. So if UnitedHealthcare was to come in and say, I'm gonna drop your rates by 5%, the hospital systems would say no. And so you're negotiating against a duopoly. Whereas me, I can go in and say, Hey, can I have a cash price for your service? And most of the times doctors will say yes, and the vast majority of the time, they will actually give me a significant discount because I'm paying them in cash. Now why is that? Primarily because each doctor has about three people that he, he, he or she needs to build health insurance plans.

1 (8m 53s):
In addition, He or she spends about 30% of their time fighting with health insurance plans about what they can or cannot do with their patients. So by going and paying in cash, I eliminate all that hassle, all those costs, all of the craziness of, you know, getting approvals from health insurance plans to actually do what I want to do, which is just take care of, of the patient. So in essence, what we're doing is we're ripping the health insurance plan out from the middle of that doctor patient relationship. And that's why we're getting our members prices for their services. About 50% of what health plans pay for the exact same service.

0 (9m 30s):
Well, let's get specific and talk about paying with cash. So how does cash pay actually lead to better rates for the healthcare services that we need?

1 (9m 39s):
I'll give you a couple quick examples. We have a member who either today or yesterday had a brain surgery, a local hospital, said it was $77,000 to do that brain surgery. We said, Hey, you know, can we find you another hospital and that would be willing to do that, you know, less expensively. And, and the, the woman's like, you know what, I really, really love my doctor. I really love this hospital. But sure, go and take a look. Well, there's a hospital that's actually specialized in this specific procedure that was willing to do it for around $30,000, 10 miles away from this woman. And as long as this woman would pay in cash on the day of the procedure.

1 (10m 23s):
So if you think about the way that these hospitals work is typically what they have to do is they would have to bill health insurance, they would have to fight with health insurance over what rate they're gonna get paid. They wouldn't get paid for 30, 60 or 90 days. So what this hospital is saying, look, if you can pay me on the day of the procedure, I will give you significantly significant discounts 'cause I don't have to deal with any of that hassle. And that's, you know, the reason why we're getting so much better rates for our members than than a UnitedHealthcare or a Cigna or an Aetna can get their members.

0 (10m 56s):
And so in that scenario, how do you deal typically with that woman or man if it's a different scenario or they're like, but I really like my doctor. I really trust my doctor.

1 (11m 7s):
Let me talk about the mechanics of actually her paying in cash because I think this is important. And then I'll, I'll talk about the other, the doctor one. So, you know, that's a, let's just say it's a $30,000 surgery. You know, what CrowdHealth will do is we'll go over, go around to about 300 of our members and say, Hey members, would you give this woman in Arizona a hundred dollars so that she can go get this brain surgery? And they can say yes or no. And if they say yes, then a hundred dollars goes from their account to this woman's account. We set up a, a bank account, basically it's a, like a Venmo account when you, when you start. And so we see all that money transfer, we make sure that she's got $30,000 in there so when she shows up to get her brain surgery, the money is there, they can, you know, pay the hospital.

1 (11m 54s):
So we've done that. We, we've adjudicated about 10,000 bills. Every bill that's been submitted to the community like that has gotten paid. And it's everything from, you know, a brain surgery that we just talked about to a lead little pediatric visit. So the, to kind of, the other part of your question is like, Hey, I really, really love my doctor. Well you can go to your doctor, all we're asking is us to give you a another option. And so then the question becomes is like, do you want the 70, I think it was 77,000, something like that, somewhere between 70, 77, I can't remember exactly number, but do you want the $77,000 doctor or do you want the $30,000, you know, option? And if I can show you that the doctor who's actually doing the 30,000 option is better than the one that's gonna do it for 77,000, wouldn't you choose the 30?

1 (12m 44s):
And so we go through a process to show this doctor all the residencies, all the, the schooling that this doctor has, this doctor's done more of these procedures than almost anybody in the country has done. And so we provide the member with the absolute data as opposed to just the bedside manner of the doctor, which is typically how we will evaluate our doctors. What if we can prove to you that this doctor is actually better at the surgery and can do it for a lower price and then give her that data and then she can decide for herself. And in this case, the the member decided to, to go to the second doctor. So I think it's just about educating our members. 'cause inevitably what we think, and I'm sure some of your, your listeners are thinking like, oh my gosh, like I, am I gonna be forced to go to the discount doctors?

1 (13m 28s):
Like, are those no doctors? You know, not as good as the ones who are 77,000. It's no doesn't, it's actually the opposite of that. So, you know, in in healthcare, if you think about this, if you have a doctor that does, you know, five knee surgeries a day versus five C knee surgeries a month, who's gonna be able to do that at a lower cost? The one that does it for five surgeries a day. They will go in, they'll see the same complication that they've seen, you know, a dozen times before. The one who does it five a month may not have seen that complication. The outcomes aren't as good, you're gonna have to come back and get your knee redone 'cause they didn't do it right the first time. And so in essence, what you want is to find doctors who do this more than any other doctor out there.

1 (14m 11s):
They're gonna be better at it. They're gonna actually be lower cost at it. And that's, you know, a kind of a key component to the way that we, we operate. So it's, it's kind of counterintuitive, but this is what we're, we're finding again over 10,000 bills over the last three years.

0 (14m 25s):
Wow. Fire Nation. This is really where we're taking this world to a more opportunistic opportunities are abound. For anybody who wants to say, you know what, I'm gonna step back. I'm not just gonna jump in the train and let it take me wherever it goes. But I know there's opportunities. There's companies like CrowdHealth that are giving me opportunities. Let me see what's around. and we have a lot more to talk about around this when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Artificial intelligence is at the top of everyone's newsfeed. So we all know there are plenty of business pros out there benefiting from ai. AI can help you save time, brainstorm ideas and tackle your to-do list. But knowing about it and putting it into practice are two different things. So what's the first step?

0 (15m 6s):
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0 (15m 53s):
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0 (16m 40s):
Visit Thought-Leader.com/fire, join Taylor for his free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart and out into the world where it belongs. That's Thought-Leader.com/fire. So Andy, one thing that I hear from a lot of people, like a lot of my friends, especially from college are saying, John, I really don't like my job, but man, the benefits are great. And I was in the military for eight years, I was an officer and that was one thing I heard so much, so much from people that are in the military with me. He's like, John, I wanna get outta the military. 'cause there's, you know, there's things I love about it, but there's things I don't love about it. But man, like eight more years and my benefits, you know, are for life or 10 more years or the, the, you know, the benefits are great.

0 (17m 23s):
It's sad that one of the primary reasons that so many people never set foot down the entrepreneurial path is the pain and fear they have of these potential healthcare costs. Talk to this,

1 (17m 36s):
You know, I saw a, a study pretty recently that from Rand that said somewhere between two and 4 million Americans would go do something entrepreneurial if it weren't for healthcare costs. Wow. And to me that's un-American. I mean we're, we're shackled to our big corporate jobs or to the government or to the military or whatever because of, of healthcare. And one of the reasons why I wanted to start this company is I wanted to unleash the power of entrepreneurship from those two to 4 million people who would go and do it if it weren't for, for healthcare. You know, ours is incredibly reasonable. It's 175 bucks a month if you're a single person. You know, there's no massive deductibles.

1 (18m 19s):
So, you know, we're trying to make healthcare accessible to everybody so that everybody who wants to can with a really good feeling of security go out and and start a company. So entrepreneurs, freelancers, gig workers are by far our number one group of people who come and join us. Interestingly, doctors and nurses are our number two group, but you know, so we are set up specifically for that group. And so we'd be, you know, super excited to have those types of, of people join us. You know, the great thing about those types of people too is you are helping other people in the community who are entrepreneurs like you, they take radical self ownership, self-responsibility, and they just act in a different way, take care of themselves in a different way than the the general population.

1 (19m 12s):
And so if you think we have this group of, you know, six, almost 6,000 people who are helping each other with healthcare expenses, who would you want to help with their healthcare expenses? You know, you'd want to help folks like you who are entrepreneurs who are go-getters who are going after it. You know, funny enough, and we, I know we can talk about, you know, more about this in a minute, but number one expense in, in the crowdfunding requests are pregnancies. We have a lot of pregnancies. Number two is active injuries. So it's people who are out doing things, being active. Those are the types of folks that we, we have in our, in our community. And so we're, you know, we're, we're fired up to, to have a community of, of entrepreneurs and freelancers,

0 (19m 54s):
Fire Nation. I just have to say the flexibility, the opportunity that you have to really take control of your healthcare and to not just be at the beck and call or at the decision of some other individual and company. And these large indivi, you know, they just, they don't know you, they don't care about you. They just are looking at the bottom lines and they're trying to figure things out. And there are viable alternatives to health insurance and we've been talking about it throughout this entire interview, but really take it home for us. Andy, what are the viable alternatives to health insurance?

1 (20m 30s):
Yeah, I really truly believe that helping each other directly through a crowdfunding approach, we call it back to the future. It's how we've done it for hundreds if not thousands of years. If people in our community are in need of help. What, what have we done in, you know, in the, in the past we've, we've gone over and we've plowed their fields or you know, done whatever they needed to do for us to help them financially, physically, communally, whatever they needed for us to do. And, and in the 1970s, the government and health insurance placed themselves in between us and our community members. And so I think we need to get back to where we were before.

1 (21m 11s):
And so let me give you a specific example here. We had a member in, in Tennessee over the summer who got her fingers chopped off by a, in a voting accident. And so we, and this was tens of thousands of dollars of expenses, we went out to our community and we said, Hey, we have this woman, her name is Abby, she's 19, she's in Tennessee. She, she needs help. We had people come back to us and say, Hey, can I give more? I know that you asked for a hundred, but can I give $200 to Abby? Like, because that's another human being, right? You're giving your money directly to another human being as opposed to a big health insurance company. And there's power in that. So instead of you having to give your your monthly check to, you know, big cold insurance company, that's actually your enemy when it comes to, you know, getting your bills paid, you're actually sending your money directly to another person, another human being and helping them.

1 (22m 6s):
Like how cool is that? So we think that that community component, we say fund humans not health insurance is just a really important differentiator between us and, and health insurance. And it's kind of back to our Roots in the way that we've done things for hundreds or even thousands of years.

0 (22m 22s):
So Andy, if Fire Nation wanted to learn more about what you have going on and they could maybe learn more about CrowdHealth and how they can get involved. Like, which by the way, Fire Nation, Kate's been involved with CrowdHealth for quite some time now and I always love opening our mailbox and just seeing a, a letter from CrowdHealth 'cause we know what it is. Cha-Ching. So tell us a little more about that Andy,

1 (22m 44s):
We appreciate you all being there and, and Kate as you've been, you know, very public about, you know Right. Had a, had a baby on Crowd CrowdHealth or with CrowdHealth, you know, from what I understand has been a, a great experience. I know that you all had some kind of complications afterward that

0 (22m 59s):
Yeah, we had to spend seven days in the nicu, which of course is very scary because you, you don't exactly know with this newborn, but you don't want to be adding on like financial terror on top of that as well. So yeah, really great point. Yeah,

1 (23m 12s):
Totally. And so you're, you're probably gonna get bills here soon if you haven't started getting them already that are gonna add up to 150 or $200,000 is my desk. We've had many, many NICU babies in the past. And so what we do is we take all of those bills, we'll negotiate with that hospital on your behalf and we will then go and crowdfund that money so that you and Kate have the money to pay that hospital. You know, and that takes, you know, four to six weeks to get that all figured out basically. And so, you know, ni NICU babies, which are are some of the most expensive healthcare costs out there are, you know, very doable with, with CrowdHealth. We've had six cancer cases, we've had a dozen NICU babies, we've had motorcycle accidents, all kinds of, of big health events that the community has helped out with.

1 (24m 3s):
So this is good for the little stuff in addition to the big stuff,

0 (24m 6s):
Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with and hello, you've been hanging out with Andy and JLD today, so let's keep up the heat and for links to everything we talked about, visit EOFire.com type Andy in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up and Andy one more time. What is your call to action for our listeners today?

1 (24m 27s):
Join CrowdHealth dot com. You can get up, signed up there. It literally takes you five minutes. If you have a family, maybe it'll take you seven minutes If you use the promo code EOF for Entrepreneurs on Fire, you can get 99 bucks a month for the first three months per person. So there's a, a little add to your, to your audience. We'd love to give you, you know, a little taste of what we can do. We think you'll enjoy it. So fortunate that, that, John, you, you've been a member, your wife's been a member. Your, your new little one is a member and so we're so thankful that y'all have been a member of CrowdHealth for what, a couple years now, two or three years.

0 (25m 4s):
Yeah, it's been a great experience. We've been users, you know, well before this interview was ever lined up. Fire Nation. So this is totally an independent action and you know, we heard about it actually, I honestly believe this, I'll have to double check with Kate is that she heard it a couple years ago on a podcast and was like no brainer and has been on it ever since. And so it's cool that I get now to share with my audience on this podcast that you know, that we've been users for multiple years and and loving the experience so far. So Andy, I just wanna say thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation and for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks

1 (25m 42s):
For having me.

0 (25m 42s):
Hey, Fire Nation a huge thank you to our sponsors and Andy for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation's. Successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, focus. That is why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things in a hundred days and we're talking step by step. So visit the MasteryJournal.com. I'll catch you there. We're on the flip side, the Gold Digger podcast hosted by my good friend, Jenna Kutcher is brought to you by the Hubspot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business acts, inspirational stories, and so much more. A must listen.

0 (26m 22s):
Episode is one of Jenna's recent on everything you need to know about affiliate marketing. Listen to Gold Digger, wherever you get your podcasts ever thought of giving a TEDx talk. It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. In four time TEDx. Speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought-Leader can help you get there. Visit Thought-Leader.com/fire to join Taylor's free trading, where he teaches you how to land a TEDx Talk and spread your message to millions.