Helping Healthcare Scale
Mark Geiger's Entrepreneurial Voyage: Reinventing Healthcare with Revolt Alliance and Disruptive Direct Care Models
Imagine a world where your healthcare operates as smoothly as your Spotify playlist. That's the revolutionary potential of Direct Primary Care (DPC) models and "not so supplemental" health plans, topics we dissect with Mark's expert perspective. These emerging parallel healthcare economies could be the key to unlocking affordable, efficient care. We take you through the intricacies of these models, the substantial benefits for employers, and how embracing such innovations could signal a seismic shift in an industry ripe for change.
As the conversation wraps, we tackle the truth behind the broken healthcare system and the pioneering solutions peeking through the cracks of the status quo. Mark sheds light on the predatory nature of the healthcare industry and how performance health plans offer a lifeline, aligning with employers' interests to trim the financial fat. Your takeaways from our chat with Mark Geiger won't just be a glimpse into the mind of a healthcare rebel—they'll be an arsenal of insights that could transform how you approach healthcare in business, and perhaps, lead you on your own path of industry disruption.
If you need help finding the perfect location or your ready to invest in commercial real estate, email us at podcast@leadersre.com.
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Imagine a world where your healthcare operates as smoothly as your Spotify playlist. That's the revolutionary potential of Direct Primary Care (DPC) models and "not so supplemental" health plans, topics we dissect with Mark's expert perspective. These emerging parallel healthcare economies could be the key to unlocking affordable, efficient care. We take you through the intricacies of these models, the substantial benefits for employers, and how embracing such innovations could signal a seismic shift in an industry ripe for change.
As the conversation wraps, we tackle the truth behind the broken healthcare system and the pioneering solutions peeking through the cracks of the status quo. Mark sheds light on the predatory nature of the healthcare industry and how performance health plans offer a lifeline, aligning with employers' interests to trim the financial fat. Your takeaways from our chat with Mark Geiger won't just be a glimpse into the mind of a healthcare rebel—they'll be an arsenal of insights that could transform how you approach healthcare in business, and perhaps, lead you on your own path of industry disruption.
If you need help finding the perfect location or your ready to invest in commercial real estate, email us at podcast@leadersre.com.
Sign up for a FREE vulnerability analysis and lease renewal services
View our library on apple podcasts or REUniversity.org.
Connect on Facebook.
Commercial Real Estate Secrets is ranked in the top 50 podcasts on real estate
And it had a big ravine, it had a big ditch and me and my little friends would go down there play army in the ditch and we started finding all these golf balls right From these terrible golfers that are slicing their balls, and so I took them home and I washed them and was cleaning them and took them to school with me one day and my principal was a big time golfer and he offered, he said, hey, man, I'll buy that golf ball from you.
Speaker 2:The goal of this show is to help healthcare organizations scale by leveraging real estate strategies and interviewing high level healthcare executives who are actively in the trenches in order to pull out lessons learned along the way. If you'd like a free site selection analysis from our team, or you'd like to learn more about how we're acquiring real estate through our fund on the blockchain, visit us at wwwreuniversityorg and drop us a line that's RE as in real estate universityorg.
Speaker 3:Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Helping Healthcare Scale. I'm your host, austin Hare. Our guest today is Mark Geiger. He is the co-founder and managing partner of the Revolt Healthcare Alliance, which is a national health insurance agency doing business in 34 states with over 300 agents nationwide. So what they do is they typically help employers save on their annual healthcare costs by offering a solution in a parallel economy, operating outside of the traditional healthcare economy. And what is a parallel economy? Don't worry, we're gonna get all into that. So, mark, thanks for coming on the show today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, I'm excited. I think this information is gonna be extremely helpful to your audience.
Speaker 3:Great, yes, let's go ahead and just get a feel for who you are and before we go too deep into the weeds. And I'm just curious how did you get on this path? Did you know early on from childhood you were gonna be an entrepreneur? Did you have any influential parents or father figures that were entrepreneurial? Like, how far back can we go to start tracing this trail?
Speaker 1:Yes, both my parents were in the healthcare field.
Speaker 1:My dad was physician assistant. He was one of the first PA classes that ever, yeah. And then my mom was a registered nurse and they were both military and not only were they in healthcare but we had free healthcare. But growing up I had no idea how much healthcare costs, man. I just thought everybody had great free healthcare.
Speaker 1:As far as the entrepreneurial side, I'm pretty much the only one in my family that's an entrepreneur. I have thinking back on childhood. I was always trying to do something. I think the first real organized entrepreneurial effort I had was in literally third grade. I lived next to a golf course and it had a big ravine, it had a big ditch and me and my little friends would go down there and put an army in the ditch and we started finding all these golf balls from these terrible golfers that are slicing their balls, and so I took them home and I washed them and was cleaning them and took them to school with me. One day my principal was a big time golfer and he offered. He said hey, man, I bought a golf ball from you and the next thing I knew I discovered there was a market for used golf balls. So I got pretty organized.
Speaker 1:I set aside time weekly to go find them, cleaned them up, scrubbed them, got my mom to give me the leftover egg cartons and would literally not just sell them to the principal at school, but I'd go back out to the golf course and sell them to the exact same guys that lost them.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, so there was that. And then it's funny because I literally did the exact same thing growing up, like we would go. We lived close to golf carts. We'd go into the woods, we'd find all the golf balls. We'd get a little table, we'd set them out and then we would just sell them to the I don't remember what it was like 25 cents, 50 cents, who? Knows, but yeah when your cost of goods hold is zero, it's not very hard to make a profit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did 25 cents, 50 cents Occasionally, man, if it was a brand new ball we would get a dollar out of it, but so that's not even the good one. The best one was when I was in junior high, right? So I mentioned that my parents were in the military. We lived overseas, we lived in Germany for four years and when I got there I realized there's a lot of stuff different. But one of the things is when you're a kid, the candy's different, right, you couldn't get jolly ranchers, you couldn't get nerds, you couldn't get the candy that you were used to back home. And one Easter my aunt from Ohio sent us a basket full of American candy and I was eating them at school one day and my buddy was like, hey, man, I'll give you five bucks for that bag of jolly ranchers. And next thing, you know man, I'm running the import business from.
Speaker 1:Ohio to Germany. Man, I called my aunt, I said hey, I need you to start sending me candy every month. And I, literally, man, that was my first international import business.
Speaker 3:And that's so funny. Was this a part-time job? Were you spending like a couple hours a week on it, and how serious did you get with it?
Speaker 1:No, it's just a good story. Hey, so it was better than my allowance.
Speaker 3:It was really good for me to do a job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it definitely taught me supply and demand. I think at one point when everybody found out, hey, geiger's getting all this candy from Ohio, man, I definitely went up on my rage. I think at one point, actually, my parents got mad because at one point I was getting 20 bucks for a $2 bag of jolly ranchers and yeah, they weren't excited about that.
Speaker 3:They thought you were exploiting the locals. Hey, supply and demand.
Speaker 1:I learned it in an early age.
Speaker 3:It's funny. Ok, so yeah, then how? Because I know that you've got a 50-page white paper about the parallel economy. But before we get into that, how? Let's connect the dots? How did that get you to revolt? Health care OK.
Speaker 1:So I guess I had the whole entrepreneurial gene in my DNA and then the influence of my parents on the health care side. But growing up like you man, I got into athletics right. I think I started lifting weights when I was 12. And I just decided at an early age that that's what I wanted to do. And I ended up at 16, I said to go. I said, hey, I'm going to open a gym someday. And so I did that. It took nine. It took, I think I opened it at 23. So that would have been seven years. It took me seven years to do it.
Speaker 1:But as soon as I graduated college I worked for a couple of years, built up a little cash and I opened my first gym. I just was always involved in health and fitness. But with the gym it was on the preventive side. And what was different, how I made it into health care, is this I didn't just have a gym. It wasn't just about weight loss and memberships and looking good. I went into it with a corporate mindset, right that I wanted to help employers in the community where my gym was at lower their health care costs. I went around the corporations, I called on them. I said hey, let me put together a wellness plan. I've got this gym, I had some satellite locations and office buildings, and for I had that one for seven years. I had another one in another city for five years, both in Texas. But after 12 years of helping corporations and employers try to reduce their health care costs, nothing was working right and I figured out-.
Speaker 1:What do you mean?
Speaker 3:when you say nothing was working, were people actually using the gym and they just, but they were still getting sick.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So people were getting in shape, they were losing weight. I had one situation where I had over 700 people lose 3000 pounds in a 12 week challenge that I ran and. But when I say it wasn't working, health care costs weren't going down, they just the premiums just kept going up every year, deductibles kept going up every year, and it wasn't until I went to work in health insurance years later that I figured out why that is, and I'm just going to be real with your audience. The reason that health and wellness and fitness and preventive health care plans don't have an impact on health care costs is because the system's predatory right the health care system is designed to increase annually.
Speaker 1:And the white paper does a really good job of explaining how these large carriers, the hospitals, the big pharma, how they all use the US lobbying system to basically write the laws that are predatory. Right, forcing us to buy insurance from six main carriers. Right, it's almost like a government sponsored monopoly of the way that the system is set up. Right, there's price control mechanisms, so supply issues through EPOs, hmos, epos controlling supply through the networks, and it sounds like a conspiracy, but I would challenge anybody that thinks I'm crazy to read a white paper. Look at the legislation. We outlined, the history of government legislation partnering with private business, particularly in this sense, health care, and we show the legislation. We break the whole system down, and so I realized that it didn't matter how great I was at designing preventive health care plans helping people change their lifestyle, it was the system that was broken.
Speaker 3:And so I think yeah To your point about being conspiratorial. I feel like after 2020, and then the Twitter files were released. All of a sudden, all the conspiracies actually turned out to be true, or at least a lot of them, and so, particularly what you're talking about, I first heard about it when Joe Rogan I'm trying to think of the exact episode he had a guy on there for about three hours. They talked about this exact same thing, like the medical benefit manager, right? Is that what it's called MB or HP? Health care benefit manager? What is the title?
Speaker 1:Are you talking about? Like, on the pharmacy side, they have the PBMs pharmacy benefit managers. Okay, is there one for this?
Speaker 3:to what's that they have those for insurance to, or just pharmacy. Yeah, it's a benefit manager is what they talk about. Okay, like a, like a broker, it's somebody who benefits from both sides. They're getting paid from the consumer and they get a kickback from the Seller, and so they essentially result in driving cost up.
Speaker 1:Yes, again, the white paper, it's got it. It lists all the conflicts of interest, right. So there's conflicts of interest between brokers, yeah, oh, and employers Okay, if you want to go there. That's one of the things that's driving part of this new devolution healthcare economy is what's called performance health plans and basically the way the broker model works. What you're specifically talking about, and then this will just be one example of Of the, of how predatory it is and how incentives are miss a lot.
Speaker 1:But let's say, I'm a broker, right? Signa is going to come to me and they're going to say, hey, I want you to go sell Austin's company, our, our signal health plan, benefits, right, and we're going to pay you a commission. Okay, so great, I do that. I get the commission. Now I have a fiduciary responsibility to you. I'm supposed to be trying to help you reduce your health care cost, right? But Next year when it's time for your renewal, my commissions are going to go up when your rates go up. So the incentives aren't a lot, aren't aligned right, and on top of that as a broker, I really don't have control over the rates, right.
Speaker 1:And so what, in this new devolution health care economy, what brokers with integrity have done Is there? Basically, they're going to the signal and they're saying, hey, you know what I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna business with you, I'm not gonna take commissions from you anymore. In fact, I'm gonna take it a step further. I'm gonna disintermediate you and in that scenario, I'll come to you when I say, hey, austin look.
Speaker 1:Here's what I'm gonna do for you, man. I'm going to just charge you a flat Monthly management fee. I'm going to build and manage a health plan for you. I'm gonna do exactly what SIGNA does. I'm gonna set up direct contracts. I'm gonna call the hospitals in your area if there's direct primary care. I'm gonna I'm gonna set up direct primary care for you. I'm gonna call the labs in your area. I'm gonna call the diagnostic images for your employees when they need x-rays and MRI MRIs.
Speaker 1:And Basically, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut your, your health care costs by 30, 40, 50% and at the end of the year, if I have performed this is called a performance health plan if I have performed and I've reduced your health care cost, a percentage of those savings with me. And so the conflict of interest is now gone and my incentive is aligned. Austin, I work for you, I have a fiduciary responsibility to you, and so I Get paid more if I truly help you lower your health care cost, if I perform, and that's performance health plans is one of the three primary markets that are making up this new Billion-dollar devolution health care economy that's running parallel to the current traditional system.
Speaker 3:Devolution economy is performance based for those things. Those things are like the same thing, are they similar?
Speaker 1:Okay, let's talk about devolution, right, I want to be crystal clear that, although I discovered this parallel health care economy that's actually operating in the US health care system Operating in the US right now, I didn't name it. Okay, in fact, I struggled with it like what I first discovered it first off. That's weird. It's not every day that we discovered economy. It was very surreal. I didn't even tell my business partner, my wife, about I figured they thought I was gonna be crazy. But after three months, looking at the data, the trends and showing it to a few people, everybody's yeah, this is just like uber, this is just like crypto, this is a whole new, brand new parallel economy. What are you going to name it? And so, again through research, oh, there's a thing called devolution.
Speaker 1:Okay, devolution, just In its most basic form, it means that something is Devolving or being decentralized, and devolution is typically a government function. It's. It's typically a government will legislate the act of devolution, right? So to give you some examples, devolution is occurring all around the world and it's impacting healthcare systems. It's. There's been devolution in Sweden, kenya and in UK, and in fact, in UK they actually have what's called the devolution health and care act of London. So I didn't make up devolution healthcare. But what's different about how it's happening here in the United States is, Even though there's no government legislation, even though it's not happening at the government level Because our economy runs on free market principles right, even though there's regulation, we still have our free market principles what's happening is doctors, entrepreneurs, technologists, brokers, insurance agencies like us we're partnering together to create a system that disintermediates the traditional system. So that's why it's called devolution healthcare.
Speaker 1:And just to explain to your audience, just back up, let's talk about what a parallel healthcare economy is. They're all around us. It sounds like you have to be an economist. It sounds like some fancy term, right that you've got to be an academia to understand it, and it's pretty basic, right? When I tell your audience this, their light bulb is going to go off in their head.
Speaker 1:Basically, the best example that I can give you of a parallel economy is take the Travel industry travel and hotel. In 2009, air B&B came along and it used to be when you traveled, you had to stay in a hotel. Right now, through technology and home sharing, you can stay in air B&B. I'm sorry, that was 2008. 2009. Hooper comes along and again travel instead of traveling, stay, it's traveling. Transportation used to be that when you travel, you had to catch a cab or you had to rent a car. Technology came along, the rides here came along, and now you have a parallel economy called the shared economy. People are sharing their homes, they're sharing their cars, and it's a whole new economy, right? So it is a parallel economy.
Speaker 1:Then you've got the. You've got crypto Cryptocurrency runs on. What a blockchain economy, right? You've got the traditional Economy with fiat currency, paper money, and then you've got the crypto currency running on a parallel Blockchain economy, and so it is no different with health care. It's absolutely no different. New technology, new business models, new strategic partnerships and and basically, we're disintermediating the current system. It's a wonderful time to be in.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I think healthcare man.
Speaker 1:We're helping a lot of people. We're saving people so much.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think that we've been official to relate this to a story. So what happened with us is that my daughter had like a five-year-old seizure so we had to send her to the emergency room and it was like we have insurance, like regular insurance, and then the hospital bill was $1,200 after insurance for a five-mile ride. And actually what happened was we ended up taking her. She got there, she started recovering, so when she was sitting in this waiting room, we actually they measured her heart rate or something. We took her out and then we got another bill for $275 after insurance. So we have insurance, we're paying $13,000 to $15,000 or $18,000.
Speaker 3:I don't know how much it is. There's something around there. We still have a $10,000 bill and so we're like I'm doing the hourly rate in my PED for these services and it's just off the charts right, and something is extremely broken somewhere, like extremely broken To drive the prices like this high. I can't even imagine for a single income family who's making whatever close to six figures a year, this would just be such a huge part of their percentage, of their income just in your basic healthcare stuff. And so maybe, like you could help me or help the audience understand like what's broken that makes those things so expensive.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah. So think about it. If the government is forcing you to buy insurance from six, six companies, right? And those six companies are responsible for negotiating the contracts for PPO's, hmo's, epo's, and they also own the pharmacy benefit managers, right, they're literally controlling everything, right? I hate to use this example, but some people would suggest that they're actually operating like cartels in the way that they collude with one another, in the way that they're controlling prices yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so part of the problem is the fact that there's only six healthcare companies or health insurance companies.
Speaker 1:No, there's all kinds of health insurance companies nationwide. Right, we don't deal with those six carriers. Right, we refuse to partner with them. But there's other smaller ones. Right, instead of a hundred billion dollar company, we work with a billion dollar insurance companies. Got a minus rating? Right, they're every bit as good as a signal Blue Cross Anthem, but we deal okay.
Speaker 1:So let's back up. We deal in the supplemental health insurance market. Okay, supplemental health insurance is designed to compliment your major medical insurance. You have your major medical policy here, and then it doesn't cover everything, as you well know, and so maybe you buy an accident plan or maybe you buy some critical illness to compliment it If you have something major or catastrophic. What we figured out with the supplemental market is Austin. We can sell you four products, right, we can sell you what's called an enhanced health indemnity plan, a critical illness plan, an accident plan and a specified disease plan, and they all do different things at different times depending on what you need, right? And when we wrap and bundle all four of those plants, they're half the cost of major medical and eight out of ten times it's better coverage. Right Now, this product, this bundling, is not for everyone, right, we do consultations with folks and companies and we're never going to put somebody we're never going to pull somebody out of major medical that are not going to be a good
Speaker 1:fit for this supplemental insurance but on top of the. So we wrap the four plants together, we cut the cost in half and then we give you what's called a patient advocate. Every time that you need to use your benefits, you can contact your patient advocate and tell them hey, listen, I just left my doctor's office. My doctor said I need an MRI. Can you help me? You know what? Let's not even use the MRI example. Let's use my own personal example. You wanted to use a story like the one with your daughter. I'll give you a very personal example. So in January I found out that I had to have most surgery. You see a little divot on my forehead. I had to have some benign cancer removed from my forehead. So I left the dermatologist office. I contacted my patient advocate, my concierge team, and I said hey, I'm going to have this most surgery. Can you help me out?
Speaker 1:So they called the doctor's office. They got the CPT codes, they got the DX codes and then they went to work. They called all you know, 10, 15 mile radius around my zip code and about a week later they called me up.
Speaker 1:They said hey, here's the deal Insurance, your insurance, through these through this bundle that you have, they're going to pay $2,100 for this surgery. We found a surgeon that will do it for $1,800. So if you go and you pay cash $1,800, he's a credit card Let us file a claim. Three or four weeks You'll get a check in the mail for the $2,100. I literally Austin. I literally had cancer removed from my forehead and got a check back for $256. That's how I did many plans work. It's completely different from the traditional healthcare system.
Speaker 1:But instead of go ahead and finish, and then I'll ask no, I was going to say that we see we have clients that unfortunately have heart attacks, strokes, cancer and instead of them having to go in bankrupt right, because 66% of all US bankruptcies are now due to medical debt Not only are our customers not having to go bankrupt or set up GoFundMe accounts to pay their healthcare bills, but they're actually getting money back. I got another really personal story. If you want to hear it.
Speaker 1:A friend of mine that, yeah, okay, this is crazy. Right After I sold the gyms, I went to work for Signia, the largest health insurance company on the planet, and I was there for eight years, and the seventh year there I had a shoulder injury. Okay, during that seven years, I had paid over $23,000 in premiums and really got little to no value.
Speaker 1:I'm like I used to own gyms very healthy, but that seventh year I had the injury and I spent so much money on trying to, you know like, treat it, fix it. I met my $3,000 deductible. For the first time in seven years I met my $3,000 deductible. So I'm thinking this is great. My PA's been trying to get me to do an MRI. I hadn't wanted to do it because I didn't want to pay three grand for the MRI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I go and I'm ready to get my MRI, and what happens? Signia denies it. They're a hundred billion dollar company. I'm one of their employees, been with them seven years, paid everything that I was supposed to pay and they denied my MRI. Meanwhile, my best friend had a health and dimly plan like the one I'm describing to you right now. He was a very successful entrepreneur. Him and his brother had a business for 30 years. They sold it for $48 million.
Speaker 1:This guy was an intelligent man. He had 120 employees and actually had Signia insurance for his 120 employees. While we were friends and while I was working there, after he sold his company, he didn't have insurance. The Cobra ran out and he called me up one day and he said hey, mark, that young kid been in that we hang out with, sometimes watch football, drink beer. I need his phone number, I need some health insurance. And I said, gary, you don't want to call Ben for health insurance. I don't think he sells real health insurance. He sells some health and dimly plan that I've never heard of. And Gary said no, health and dimly plan has been around since the 90s. I used to have them. They're better now and now that I don't have. Now that I'm not responsible for 120 people, 120 employees I want to help him plan, help them dimly, plan for myself. So I'm thinking okay, who am I to question the guy who sold his business for $48 million? So I connected two of them and Gary made three premium payments One in June, one in July, one in August and then in September he had to cancel a fishing trip.
Speaker 1:He was on a fishing trip up in Alaska and he had to have an emergency flight back home to Texas because his throat was closed off. He couldn't swallow, he couldn't drink, couldn't eat. And so I'm in the hospital room with him and the doctor comes in and the next thing he's telling us is Gary, there's no other way to say this You've got stage four softball cancer. And yeah, it was not fun. And as soon as I could collect myself, I stepped out of the room. The first person I called was Ben, and I called Ben and I said hey, listen, I don't know what kind of health plan you just sold my best friend, but it better be good, because I'm at the hospital and he's got stage four softball cancer. And Ben said hey, listen, I got this. He stepped in and Gary ended up passing away. He fought for six months but, and he so he yeah, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:He. He passed away in February and then in March or April I got a call from his brother and I know this is a long story, but this is how.
Speaker 3:I got into the supplemental market.
Speaker 1:This is how I discovered health, and dimly plans Did this change my life forever in terms of mission and purpose and helping people. But his brother calls me up two months after he passes away. He said hey, mark, what kind of insurance did Gary have? Man, because I'm going through his estate and there's all these insurance checks. There's literally almost to $60,000 in what's called excess indemnity checks here and they look like health insurance because they're attached to EOBs.
Speaker 1:And I said I don't know, let me call Ben, let me see what's going on. I called Ben and Ben said Mark, that's what I've been trying to tell you for the last seven years. Eight years you've been in SIGNA is this insurance is incredible, man, you need to leave there and come sell this with me. And he explained to me that after he got Gary in network and after the insurance covered, after the insurance paid the benefits for his chemo and his radiation, the money that was left over, the excess money that was left over was mailed to him and my best friend passed away from cancer. And this and I'm like who's this insurance company? And I started doing research on the supplemental market. I started doing research on the bundling, like Ben was doing and the first opportunity I got to leave SIGNA, I did, and me and Ben we started to revolt.
Speaker 1:Health care lines in part in memory of Gary, to honor him Right, and that's just one example. Man strokes, heart attacks. People might hear that story and think, oh, that's just an anomaly, that's a one off. No, we do this day in and day out. We've got over 3,000 clients nationwide and we help them cut their costs on health insurance on a daily basis, not just the premiums, but they're out of pocket too.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, that's a really compelling why. So it makes sense absolutely why I got into this business. And then, what about direct primary care Is that related to? From my understanding of it, it's essentially like patient will just purchase a monthly subscription to have access to a certain doctor or certain location or certain group of locations Again it does also work employee-wide Employee-side yeah.
Speaker 1:So a good question. I can tell you, comb through the white paper, but for your audience you say, let me kind of like package this up for them. So you've got the devolution to health care, which means that there's a parallel economy, that the health care system is devolving in a good way, it's being decentralized. The power, the control, the pricing is all being taken away from the traditional carries Blue Cross, signet and the humanity. And so what's happening is there's three primary markets that have emerged and have come together. The first one is what we do. It's the supplemental plans that we bundled, that I just described and I did name that. I call that the not so supplemental market Because it's supposed to be supplemental insurance, but when it completely replaces your main insurance, it's not so supplemental. So that's one. We just covered that. The second one we briefly touched on those are performance health plans with brokers, and I can talk a little more about that. But the third one is what you just brought up direct primary care, DPC. It's exactly what you said Basically, just like the brokers are going to the carriers and saying, hey, I don't want to do business with you anymore, the doctors are doing the same thing.
Speaker 1:They're tired of the complicated reimbursement system. They're tired of hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars in receivables that they're trying to collect, that the insurance company is not paying, wanting to hold on to, and so they're going to a basic monthly subscription model, and it's no different than Spotify, it's no different than Netflix. And if the doctor were to say to me are you serious? I can actually make a really good living through a subscription model like Spotify or Netflix, and my answer would be yes, and I would point to the data. There's a subscription index economy out there that measures all subscription businesses across the US and the data shows that subscription business models grew five times faster than retail and S&P 500 over a nine-year period. Ok, and so the benefits to the direct primary care DPC is a family of four.
Speaker 1:National average for DPC, a family of four can go in. Hey, a monthly fee of. I think the national average is $150.
Speaker 3:They can get unlimited visits, and that covers all four people, or is that per person?
Speaker 1:That covers all four people. The family and listen, it's going to vary. I'm giving you the national average for a family of four is around $150. And the advantage is I don't have a copay, I don't have to meet a deductible, and so some of these DPCs and every offering is different. Some are going to have x-ray machines there that may be.
Speaker 3:So yeah, in this particular example, is it primary care or is it forced Primary care? Ok, so then what happens. If you need to like especially, let's say, optometry or dermatology or a surgery or something like that, then what happens at that stage?
Speaker 1:That's where my market comes in. So these supplemental products we're partnering with DPC companies and we're partnering with performance health plans, and so that's where the bundling comes in. You use your DPC for your basic care and then, if something catastrophic happens, that's where the supplemental products come in. Yeah, it's a great system and it's a way for doctors to really take control of their careers again, their practices. The way the numbers work is doctors are able to see half of their patients. They're able to see half the patients, spend more time with them and double their income. There's a reason.
Speaker 3:Spotify and Netflix there's a reason to subscribe to the question. You don't offer DPC direct primary care, but you work with people who do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so great question. I'm glad you brought that up because in 2024, we're writing an entirely new white paper called how DPC is saving the US healthcare system. Dpc is the chassis and really it's the chassis for this parallel economy. You want DPC as your baseline product for your day to day primary care, outpatient type of benefits, and the thing that we need doctors to understand is they need to understand DPC, they need to be educated on the history of it, the regulations around it, the business model of it, and they need to get plugged into. So there's a company called HintHealth right, based out of California. You might even want to follow up with them for an interview. They have one of the largest DPC networks across the country. They're one of the pioneers in this space and so we're partnering with them a lot of brokers, nation Water partnering with them, and whenever they have a DPC practice in their area, that's where we start. We start with DPC. Yeah, actually, no, I'm familiar with it, I'm familiar with it.
Speaker 3:I'm familiar with it. People. They have a company called Plan Forward on the dental space. That's like it and so like just hearing them talk about that and it makes a whole lot of sense Just essentially sounds like you're cutting out the middleman is effectively what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Yeah, and it's long overdue. It's long overdue.
Speaker 3:So I know also in the White People there's a section talking about cash payers, and so people are just using cash, not using any insurance and so like, even for surgeries, everything. So how are people able to pay for cash with stuff that is so expensive in the healthcare industry?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what hospitals and providers? What they don't want to tell you is they do have a cash rate.
Speaker 1:And it's usually a fraction of the insurance rate. And going back to my example, right, had I used my insurance card, I'm sure that the provider would have. If I'd handed my insurance card, that provider would have said, oh, they would have called the insurance company, like my patient advocate did, and saw that the benefits would have paid out $2,100. I guess how much my surgery would have been. It would have been $2,100, right, yeah, so I'm told by healthcare costs right.
Speaker 1:By me having the option, and some hospitals are pushing back right. They're trying to tell patients oh no, if you have insurance, you've got to use your insurance card.
Speaker 1:Well, last time I checked and we live in a free market I don't have to use my credit card, I can pay cash, I can pay for services however I want, and so those cash pay rates are just a fraction of what the multiples of the overpriced the surgeries. So cash pay, it's a huge trend. It's huge. There's so Dr Keith Smith I don't know if he's famous, right, he was an anesthesiologist in Oklahoma City and back in the 1990s, time Magazine did an article on this guy man. He opened a surgery center and had the best business model and the best service and the managed care. Right, he couldn't, he wasn't, he didn't have the margins that he need to have a thriving practice. This guy basically said okay, you know what, I'm going to start pricing more, I'm going to stop taking Medicare, medicaid, I'm going to stop dealing with insurance companies and I'm going to go to a cash pay model. And that was over 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, cash pay, all of this stuff, it's not even new. It's not even new. It's just that I'm identifying all of these different things and helping people understand. You've got this cash pay model over here. You've got direct primary care over here. You've got the not so supplemental products. Here You've got performance health plans. There's now price transparency software.
Speaker 1:Silicon Valley, the private equity community, has invested, I'm going to say $427 million almost half a billion dollars into companies that offer price transparency, and so it's becoming easier and easier for people to know what they're going to pay for services before they go, because of this new software. And so all of these things, all of these pioneers, and my hats off to them. There's a bunch of them, and Dr Keith Smith is just one of them, but hats off to all of the pioneers that have been thumbing their noses and standing up to the traditional system and saying you know what? This is not right, this is predatory government, you're over regulating. There's basically collusion going on and just organically, all these different entrepreneurs and stakeholders set out in their own space to try to fix what was wrong and make it better. And when you combine all of those, what do you have? You have a parallel economy called Devolution Health Care. The whole system's evolving and it's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because I'm not a fan of really socializing very many things at all. I'd have never been a fan of socializing healthcare, but at the same time, we don't have a free market healthcare system in the US. When people oppose it, the thing is, like you said, it's a cartel that's operating like that owns most of the insurance companies, most of the big hospital chains, most of the pharmacies, like they're collectively owned by several groups, and so I can't imagine it getting much worse under the current system unless something just like totally disrupts it. And yeah, that's a big part of my just thinking about it and motivation for having you come on the podcast. And then we talked a little bit too. I know you talked about performance health plans earlier. That's the third market, but can we just maybe talk a little bit more about that to put a bow on all three of these different markets?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so performance health plans are going to be for the larger companies that are willing to self fund. And again, I'm a broker and I'm going to build you a health plan and essentially what I'm doing is I'm building you your own custom network with the hospitals in your areas, the labs in your areas, the imaging facilities, and I call those devolved networks, these custom networks that are being built for you. I come in and we have to fight tooth and nail to get your claims data from your old carrier that you want to leave right. There's a lot.
Speaker 1:There's some lawsuits going on right now about who owns the claim data right. Does your company and your employee? Do you own your claims data or does the insurance company? And what these performance brokers are doing is they're looking at your claims data just like the insurance company does, and they're building you a network and they partner with a TPA, a third party administrator who can handle the claims in the building, and it's literally hands on, customized approach to managing your employees population. And yet I'm not brokers, are not taking commissions from someone else. They're working directly for you and they're maintaining their fiduciary responsibility.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I like it just sounds so much better. That's the thing is just from a first principle perspective. You have to look at where do your incentives align, or what are the incentives of the counterpart? Right, and it's just like we've just created a system and incentives do not align like you were talking about at first. Let's relate that to retirement accounts stock market brokers.
Speaker 3:Forever, the brokers in Wall Street made all their money by placing trades regardless of management fees, so they didn't really matter the performance of the assets.
Speaker 3:So a lot of these people have invested their entire savings accounts into mutual funds, thinking that they're going to be getting above market returns. Meanwhile, the managers are getting their fixed 2% fee and they're underperforming the profits right, and so what do you have there? You have a reverse incentives because they're getting paid regardless of the performance, and that's just one example, but it goes to show how much room we have to go before we can fix this problem, and that's what like from the sounds of it, I think you guys are making huge strides in correcting that, and so the other thing I wanted to talk about too, is this podcast focused a lot on helping healthcare scale multi-site healthcare groups in a lot of different industries, obviously a lot of dental, but also urgent care and some Derm and some behavioral health and some veterinarian and stuff like that. And just like how would? Because we're talking a lot about the consumer side but how would this benefit it from the provider side or the employer side?
Speaker 1:Yes, your podcast is all about helping people scale right. How can they grow and scale their business? And at the end of the day, you need capital to do that and one of the largest expenses that employer is going to have is their healthcare costs. But if you can get plugged in with an agency like ours, that's going to, depending on your size we may be able to cut your insurance costs by 40 to 50%. Or if you're on a performance health plan, typically for first year, savings on performance health plans we're seeing as high as 30%. So for your listeners out there, they just they know what their monthly costs are. If they could cut that in half, what's that number? And then if they could take that cash flow, maybe they don't have to borrow as much to scale, to open up that second office. Maybe they don't have to borrow anything at all if the savings are significant.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that's the headline, that's the headline here is that your audience can cancel the traditional health care system and start buying health care.
Speaker 3:Yeah full health care benefits for after-cost or whatever. Something like that yeah.
Speaker 1:Hey, listen, austin, you know what our biggest problem is. People say, hey, this is too good to be true. It sounds insane After decades of being programmed and conditioned to think that there's nothing that you can do about your cost going up and then being scammed by the health care system and insurance in general. Right, they're like have a bad rep for wanting to take premiums and not pay out.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are cynical, a lot of people are skeptical, and they should be. But you know what I tell them is? You know what? Try the devolution health care economy, right? Hey, listen, don't even come to Revolve Health Care Alliance. Let us get you plugged in with health. Let us get you plugged in with a performance broker. We don't care if you buy from us, we'll help you anyways. And if it doesn't work, you don't like it after 12 months? Okay, go back to the old system.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating and I think it's definitely a conversation worth exploring for everybody. So we talked about a lot, we zigged and zagged and obviously the white paper is 50 pages long and there's a ton of content in there, but is there anything that we didn't touch on that you'd like to touch on before we wrap?
Speaker 1:No, I guess I would say the thing that I'm most excited about man, with where America is at as a nation, as a country, with the things that we've had to go through the last three years, and just that feeling that is hovering over all of us, the uncertainties, the anxieties that families and employers may be feeling about everything that we've gone through or is being opened up. I'd like to end just on a positive thought. Right, this new economy was born out of pure entrepreneurial grit. Americans, like we, just have a way of always maintaining our freedom, whether it's personal, whether it's professional and devolution. Healthcare is just the latest example of how we always find a way to maintain our freedom. And I've never been more excited as an entrepreneur. At a time when things are looking as bleak as they are, our faith is being challenged by the current system. I've never had a more positive outlook, and it's because I see firsthand, I'm on the front lines and I see what's going on and we're just here to help people, and it's just a really exciting time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that. So what's a good resource for people to reach out and find more information about what you guys are doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would encourage them to go to RevoltHealthcarecom. Okay, there's a page called Devolution. They can download the executive summary, or it's RevoltHealthcarecom they can go. They can download the executive summary or they can download a whole 50-page report. If they're an individual or family, they can request a quote. If they're a company, they can request a quote. It's a different process and we're going to be honest, right, if we can't help you, we're going to get you plugged in with one of our partners.
Speaker 3:So yeah, great, great, I love it. Mark, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you taking your time coming on the show and sharing your story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I appreciate it and hey, I wanted to say this at the beginning, but congratulations on the Ninja Warrior stuff. Man, I watched your videos and that's incredible. I'm 5'10" and I weigh, on average throughout the year, around 225 pounds. I'm very athletic, I'm very strong, but I can't imagine all of the upper body strength and dangling and hanging, like you did, for several minutes at a time. That's an incredible accomplishment man.
Speaker 3:No, I appreciate it. It sounds like you've got a lot of strength through just different types, right, and so that's the thing. Every sport just has its own type of fitness and, yeah, unless you train that sport, it's going to be hard to be fit in there. But it's been a lot of fun and I really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, thanks, Austin.
Speaker 4:If you need help finding the perfect location for your practice or you're ready to invest in commercial real estate, email us at podcastleadersrecom that's podcastleadersrere as in real estatecom, or go to leadersrecom and fill out our form. See you next time.