Have you ever felt that our healthcare system is impersonal and profit-driven? Today, we have a fascinating discussion with Andy Schoonover, founder of CrowdHealth, who shares his journey of creating an alternative solution to traditional health insurance.
Andy tells us a compelling story of opting out of his Obamacare plan due to sky-high costs and taking innovative steps to secure his family's health. He shares his vision of forming a supportive community that can assist each other financially in times of need. We also explore the historical evolution of health insurance and its influence on escalating healthcare costs. CrowdHealth, in stark contrast, aims to manage expenses while allowing doctors to focus primarily on providing care.
Towards the end, we engage in an enlightening discussion about CrowdHealth's approach to dealing with hospital bills and promoting transparency in costs. We also touch upon how fostering a sense of community can regulate behaviors and cultivate trust. Join us for this eye-opening conversation about redefining healthcare, where you'll surely gain valuable insights.
Find Andy at-
JOIN CROWD HEALTH!! I'm so glad I'm a member. Use this link to try it, cancel anytime!
https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/
TW- @joincrowdhealth
IG- @joincrowdhealth
Special Loe to-
My new favorite gym! The Refinery in Sandy, UT! Thank you John and Jess!
Garrett Gunderson, author of Disrupting Sacred Cows
Find Boundless Body at-
Have you ever felt that our healthcare system is impersonal and profit-driven? Today, we have a fascinating discussion with Andy Schoonover, founder of CrowdHealth, who shares his journey of creating an alternative solution to traditional health insurance.
Andy tells us a compelling story of opting out of his Obamacare plan due to sky-high costs and taking innovative steps to secure his family's health. He shares his vision of forming a supportive community that can assist each other financially in times of need. We also explore the historical evolution of health insurance and its influence on escalating healthcare costs. CrowdHealth, in stark contrast, aims to manage expenses while allowing doctors to focus primarily on providing care.
Towards the end, we engage in an enlightening discussion about CrowdHealth's approach to dealing with hospital bills and promoting transparency in costs. We also touch upon how fostering a sense of community can regulate behaviors and cultivate trust. Join us for this eye-opening conversation about redefining healthcare, where you'll surely gain valuable insights.
Find Andy at-
JOIN CROWD HEALTH!! I'm so glad I'm a member. Use this link to try it, cancel anytime!
https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/
TW- @joincrowdhealth
IG- @joincrowdhealth
Special Loe to-
My new favorite gym! The Refinery in Sandy, UT! Thank you John and Jess!
Garrett Gunderson, author of Disrupting Sacred Cows
Find Boundless Body at-
Hello and welcome to another episode of Balanced Body Radio. I'm your host, Casey Ruff, and today we have another amazing guest to introduce you. Now, Andy Schoonover is the founder of CrowdHealth, a company he founded to address serious issues with our current health insurance model. Sadly, every single year, 250,000 insured individuals are forced to declare bankruptcy due to medical expenses. This serves as a clear indication that the current system is ineffective and primarily benefits the medical industry. Frustrated by the lack of justifiable explanations, Andy has chosen to focus on building a superior solution.
Speaker 1:The conventional health insurance often lacks personal touch and reliability, driven by distorted incentives. However, at CrowdHealth, the focus is on changing this narrative. Members are treated like family, receiving assistance throughout their health journey and having their bills managed at an affordable price. The aim is to create a system that prioritizes keeping members healthy rather than profiting from their illnesses. Ultimately, the goal is to redefine the concept of healthcare in society. This realization ultimately led Andy to understand that the system was flawed, prompting him to establish CrowdHealth as a more compassionate and dependable alternative for healthcare payment. Visit wwwjoincrowthealthcom to learn more. Andy Schoonover, what an absolute honor it is to welcome you to Balanced Body Radio.
Speaker 2:Man, thanks for having me Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's such an honor. I'm so, so, so excited for this conversation. Before we dig in, I have to ask you live in Austin how was the Formula One race that happened this weekend at the time of the recording?
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, incredible. We were talking about it before we got on and just had a great time. The weather was beautiful, the people were great. You know the great the fun thing about this is that there was the guy that was hosting me. I asked who had gone to all the Formula One races so I don't know what it was like 20 Formula One races and he said the favorite place to go is the United States, and specifically, you know, austin. It was pretty neat to experience.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Yeah, the first year that Formula One came to Austin specifically was, I believe, in 2012, and there was maybe like 100,000 people that even went Like I was completely unaware of Formula One at the time and since Netflix has released that amazing series Drive to Survive, tons of people are hooked into it. I'm hooked into it, my wife loves it, and now they're getting over 400,000 attendees over the course of a weekend. It's insane.
Speaker 2:Crazy.
Speaker 1:That's so crazy.
Speaker 2:I don't have any two hours to get home. I do not doubt it. They had the Killers on Friday night, which I'm a big Killers fan for the music fans out there, so it was a really fun time.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Drivers love the track. They love eating lots of barbecue. That's all they really tend to talk about, which is amazing in Austin, yeah, and super fun. And I'll just tell the listener, like I don't care, if you don't care about car racing, I don't care about car racing traditionally. Watch the first five minutes of season one, episode one. Give it five minutes. If you hate it, turn it off, don't worry about it, but odds are. I think you might get a bit addicted.
Speaker 2:And you'll lose several hours of your life as a result.
Speaker 1:You will lose. Lose or invest, depending on how you want it, yeah, whatever, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, Dude. Okay. So I will often joke on my show that I'm asking like honest questions or selfish questions, and this entire episode is going to be me asking very, very selfish questions. I think a lot of people are in the kind of position that I'm in. I never really wanted to be an entrepreneur. We you know, my wife and I were both working for the big corporate gym pandemic. You know. They put us on unemployment. We started our own company and here we are. One of the really nice things about working for a big corporation is benefits and we lost all of them. And shopping around for health insurance it's absurd. It's astounding what the prices are and learning the system is crazy. But then, like telling our families that we don't have health insurance, they bitch at us about it Like it's. It's hugely problematic and you seem to have found a pretty cool solution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, we, we, um, health insurance is a disaster. Going in, searching for it and figuring it out, um, you know funny, quick, funny stories. I, I had a, my roommate from from business school. Um, I went to Stanford. He was number two in our class number one or number two in our class and he said the one thing that makes me feel like an idiot is health insurance, like co-pays and co-insurance and deductibles. And you know, they give you a 42 different options when you, when you get there, and it's just like you know what the hell's going on. And so I really tried to build a company that was simple. Simplicity is a core value of ours. We try to keep everything simple. Um, you know, and, and it is an alternative to health insurance that's way more effective, way more fun.
Speaker 2:It's weird to say that about healthcare, but we have a great time and you're in a community of people much like us who we want to take care of ourselves. We are, you know, in our thirties and our forties generally and we're fit and therefore the healthcare costs for the community are really really low. Um, you know, as opposed to, you're you putting money into, you know, a big pool of of capital, where a bunch of the people who are pulling money out of that capital aren't taking care of themselves. They are obese, they are, you know, doing things that you and I wouldn't be doing and are making bad choices. So, you know, you're really in a community of people who are taking care of themselves. So we got a lot of pregnancies, we've got a lot of active injuries, a lot of mountain bike face plants, things like that that just happen when you're when you're active and you're in your thirties and forties. So it's a good group of people to be a part of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's amazing. I think about that all the time, like I. Why would I subsidize somebody who is not taking care of themselves and and they're chronically sick? I haven't been to the doctor in like 10 years, but, but what's going to happen to me is that face plant on the mountain bike. I'm going to get clobbered by a semi truck on my road bike, like that's what I worry about. That's going to be hugely expensive and so not being covered is really uncomfortable for those situations, but it's. It's cool to know that you've you've found a solution which we're definitely going to talk about. We're definitely going to talk about you know, the nexus of starting the company and why you decided to do that. But before we do, I want to learn about your own health journey. I know that you're kind of. You know you've been kind of keto, low carb, carnivore-ish for a while. Can you tell us a little bit about what that you know health story was for yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I think there's. There's something about getting off of health insurance, and I've talked to this a little bit with the Meet Mafia guys who we talked about before we got on. Once you become sovereign over your own health and and don't outsource that to a health insurance company, you're just perspective on your body changes you take a lot more agency over your your own body. And so it was, you know, several years ago, when I became uninsured, that I started taking care of myself. You know, and I was at the time, I think I was two, somewhere around 215, 220, I'm six, six, two, and so I started with a. What is it? What is it called? Whole 30. Yeah, right, my wife wanted me to get into Whole 30. I did that, did Whole 30 for a while. I found that that was. That was great. There's still something a little missing. I wasn't really losing the weight that I wanted to then kind of gotten the keto low carbon. I went from 215 to 180 in that.
Speaker 2:My, my, I'm, I'm, you know, I know you're a get a bunch of fit folks, but I, I was in the mid twenties in terms of like body fat and I'm now down to 12 or 13. And so you know I'm getting just just taking care of your body and ultimately, you know, what I want for myself and what I want for others too is like I want to, in my eighties, be running around the backyard with my grandkids, like that's my desire. You know, I've seen too many people, many people close to me, who aren't able to do that. I'm like man. It sucks to be able to get to your eighties and, you know, have these grandkids you want to play with you and you know everybody who's who's a grandparent always says like it's. It's even better to have Kevin kids. You know, and I was like man, I want that for myself and I want that for other people too. So you know I have taken that on as a personal thing. My wife has as well. We're trying to, through crowd health, get other people to start understanding how their body works and operates and what you know labs you should be getting and what tests you should be getting and things like that. We're trying to educate people.
Speaker 2:But you know I have said that there's three passions of wine in life. The one is to break the healthcare system, because I think all these people going bankrupt, as you mentioned, is a crime. Two is I want to break the food system because the fact that we have 70% of the people in our country are obese, 88% of the people in our country are metabolically unhealthy. You know, I want to break the food system and I want to break the monetary system, because I think it's a whole different conversation. But I'm a big, a big Bitcoin or myself maybe some of the people out there are as well but I think the monetary system is screwing people too, and so I've been able to build a company where I've been able to address each one of these things that I'm just super passionate about, and that's a great thing about building a company. You know, I can really focus it on things that I'm I'm fired up about and I think could could change the planet if it actually works.
Speaker 1:Man, I love that. Yeah, I was just reflecting. Yesterday I went to this store to go grab, you know, a little bit of ground beef to cook up for dinner. And you see the dude he's in his 50s or 60s and he's like leaning over on this like giant walking stick. He can barely move around. He's like so buckled over. It sucks that we've gotten to this place where again, healthcare costs are so expensive and crazy because of a lot of what we've been told for the last you know 60, 70 years about nutrition. It's really terrible. Tell us a story about how all this came about in your own personal life. It sounds like this had to do something with your daughter, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, so I. So this is my second company. My first company I sold a while back and as such I didn't have health insurance, because most of us get health insurance to our employers, and so it was coming off of that company. I went to Obamacare. I thought it was my only option and so I got a plan, and it was, I don't know something like 1200 bucks from me, my wife and my two girls per month, and, I joke, it worked until I had to use it.
Speaker 2:So my, my little one, who is one at the time, was having recurring ear infections, and so we went through the ear, nose and throat talk. We said she's got a hole in her eardrum. So we got went to the local hospital, got a surgery. It was a 15 minute surgery and it got the bill a few weeks later and it was $8,000. And I was like holy crap, $8,000 for a 15 minute surgery. I was like this is a whole point of health insurance, like like this is why I do this. Great, you know little did I know. A few weeks later I got another note, this time from my health insurance plan that said that it was medically unnecessary and so they refused to pay for it. And so we went through three rounds of this my doctor fighting with their doctor and they're like, look, what are you not paying for? I was like dude. She had a hole in her eardrum Like how do you not pay for this? And after doing a lot of research, what I found is a lot of these plans.
Speaker 2:They just deny claims left and right. So last year is either a lecture or the report, I can't remember 48 million claims were denied. Almost 20% of claims were denied. You have a one in five chance of your claim getting denied if you're on an Obamacare plan. And that was just like screw this, like I'm not doing this anymore, and so I ditched that plan and I saved myself $1,200 a month and I was uninsured. And so my wife and I were like, okay, how do we do this? Being uninsured, built some tools, figured some things out, and that ultimately led me to start crowd health. Because I was like there are other people out there that are either pissed off with health insurance or are uninsured and looking for something, but just can't find anything because the alternatives out there suck, and so that's why I started crowd health.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Was it nerve wracking in the beginning? It's one thing, like my wife and I, to not be insured, like I can make sure that I ride my road bike a little bit further. You know, closer to the sidewalk than the road itself. I can, you know, ride the more mellow trails that I used to ride 10 years ago to minimize the chances of me face planning on my mountain bike. But we don't have kids. Is it difficult for you to make that decision with kids?
Speaker 2:As I started thinking about it. I'm a finance guy by background and I was like, okay, what is the worst thing that could happen? I could get a massive million dollar bill or something like that and cancer or whatever it ends up being. I was like, okay, so if this is cancer, it's really bad. Probably what the hospital is going to do and just say it's a million dollar bill. They know they're not going to get a million dollars from me because I'm a fight like hell. They're not going to get a million dollars from me.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be able to negotiate that down. I'm going to be able to negotiate it down to very, very little, probably, and then they're going to stretch it out over a period of time for me. So I will have to pay monthly payments for a long time because something really big happens. But guess what? I pay monthly payments for a long time for health insurance, which I don't get crap from anyway. So I'm just going to be like I'm just going to risk it.
Speaker 2:And the probability of me or you, what are you in your 30s, 20s, 30s, yeah, just about to turn 40. 40, man, you're young dude, no, so the probability of one of us having something like that is minute. It's so, so tiny, and so we're much more likely to have an ACL tear or something like that. And even those an ACL tear you can get fixed for 12 grand and they'll spread it out over two years. Paying 500 bucks a month for a couple of years to pay for my ACL, which is I was paying $1,200 from a health insurance anyway, like what is the point? And so that's kind of the math that I went through and I said the probability of something really, really bad happening is so, so low. And then the outcome of that is still doable, feasible if I can stretch it out over a period of time and negotiate it down, and things like that. And so I was like what if crowd health negotiated that down? And what if crowd health helped you with stretching out those payments? Or, even better, what if crowd health could be able to gather a group of like-minded people who would say, hey, man, if you have something happen, I'll help you out, if I have something to happen, will you help me out? And so if you get a group of people who are all like-minded, who are willing to raise their hand to help others out, then you have something where if something really big happens, then you have a community of people who are around you and gathered and say, hey, I'll help you out, man, like for sure.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, that's the way it's happened for hundreds of years, before the 1970s when health insurance plans came in, and healthcare in the past has been very inexpensive. And it wasn't until the 70s, just like our monetary system shit hit the fan and our healthcare expenses spiked to the moon, and so it's these insurance companies that have gotten in here and we can talk about why that happened. But we've been doing this for a long time. We're just kind of going back to the future is basically what I like to say. And so we've had 5,500 people, or something like that, sign up. We've had, I think, 9,000 bills now that have been submitted and everything from cancer cases we have a brain surgery next week We've had NICU babies, we've had heart surgeries, we've had car accidents, motorcycle accidents, all kinds of stuff that our customers that are members have stepped up and said I'm willing to help out. So it's worked great so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's incredible and very brilliant. And, yeah, maybe now would be a good time to talk about the conventional system. And let's start with what you mentioned, like, how did we get to the point today? We'll talk about that too. But, like, what has been the history and what happened in the 70s? That kind of screwed everything up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean basically in the 70s you had the HMO Act of I think it was 1973 or something like that where it basically put into law the fact that these health insurance plans could build these networks and that you can then choose from any doctor in this network to be able to go to. And then you put your resources behind it and kind of built them a modern day health insurance space. And there was things in the past, for 50 years before that, that were a lot more like what we're doing and a lot less like health insurance plans. But the problem that that started when they thought these networks were such a beautiful thing. So for everybody out there who's not familiar, health insurance plans have networks. They have pre-negotiated rates with these doctors or these hospitals so that when you go there they have a contractual agreement exactly how much is going to get paid. We don't as a patient, but the two businesses do and so everybody thought this was a great idea because the health insurance plans would have all this power to go in and negotiate really low rates with this network.
Speaker 2:The problem with that is is that hospital systems have been able to consolidate. So, for example, I live in Austin. There's two hospital systems here. So if you can imagine, unitedhealthcare comes in and says hey, I want to negotiate with you St David's and Ascension, seaton and St David's and Ascension says you need both of us or you're going to lose all your business in Austin. So I'm not going to negotiate with you. And the United is like, okay, and the prices go up, because if you're a hospital, you want the prices to go up. And so why does UnitedHealthcare not really care about that?
Speaker 2:Well, in Obamacare, basically, what they said is that health insurance plans can only profit 15% of premiums. So if I have a $1,000 premium, I can only have $150 a profit. It's actually profit and administrative expenses, but same deal. So $1,000, $150 in profit. So how do I get to grow my profit by 10% to 165? My premiums have to go from 1,000 to 1,100.
Speaker 2:So I, as the health insurance plan who's supposed to be working on the patient's behalf, now have an incentive to see prices go up. So sorry if this has gone a long way in saying this, but the buyer of healthcare, which is health plans, and the sellers of healthcare, which is these hospital systems, they both want the price to go up. So what's going to happen? You don't have to have a PhD in economics to figure this out. If the buyer and seller both want the price to go up, the price is going up, and so that's the dynamic that's been created over the last 50 years, and that's why we're seeing prices go up three times the rate of inflation. So that's the issue that we've had over the last 20 years especially, but really 50 years.
Speaker 1:It's so messed up, dude, it's so bizarre. And then, even as I was working for this big corporation, obviously they subsidized my health insurance, which is fine, and I think I was on some high deductible plan because I don't use health insurance, I don't go to the medical community, it was so expensive to pay monthly my share and then the deductible was like I'm never going to hit this deductible unless I'm in the ICU or whatever. It's insane how expensive it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and even on some of these Obamacare plans, if you go into the emergency room, your deductible could be $10,000, $12,000, $14,000, which means you're paying the first $10,000 of that medical bill before the health insurance plan will pick up a dollar. So if you don't have $10,000 in your bank account, you're toast. If you have a $10,000 deductible, you have to go figure out how to sell stuff to make your deductible. And that's why, for crowd health, we're like look, we asked you to pay the first $500. If you have a mountain bike fall $500. If you tear your ACL $500. If you have a motorcycle accident, it's $500. So anybody can come up with or the vast majority of people can come up with $500. The vast majority of people can't come up with $10,000. And that's why people are going bankrupt because they don't have $10,000 to cover their deductible, and so it's putting people in a bankruptcy, which I think is a tragedy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just I wonder all the time, like every time I go on there to the Obamacare website to shop around and just like check out prices, like how do people afford this? This is like about as much as my mortgage, you know what I mean Like it's very, very expensive even on what I thought was supposed to be an affordable kind of a system for people who, who you don't have corporate health insurance. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, I mean corporate health insurance is costing, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, $7,000 for an individual and $22 or $23,000 for a family. And so people are like, well, you know, at least my employer pays for it. And I tell them I was like, look, the money that they're paying for health insurance they're not paying you. So in essence, you are paying for it. Um, these you're not getting, you know, the salary that you could have gotten because they have to pay for your health insurance. That kind of goes into one bucket. And so you know, and to give you kind of an idea of of crowd health, like our families over the last 12 months have paid under $6,000. So the corporate health insurance has paid $22 or $23. Crowd health has paid something like six for a family of four and for an individual it was like, you know, $1,500 or something like that, $1,200. And so it's it's dramatically different than the health insurance plans out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So we just switched car insurance a few months ago, switched to State Farm like a good neighbor, state Farm's there, whatever. They send us a little Bluetooth connected device that I put in my car to make sure I'm not driving, like you know, a terrible Formula One driver bumping into everybody, speeding, breaking too hard, whatever rates me right, and it incentivizes me to drive smarter, to not be on my cell phone when I'm driving and if I drive safe according to their metrics, I get a discount and health insurance again. It's. It's not even like any other kind of insurance. It doesn't work like that at all.
Speaker 2:No, it's actually illegal. You can't do that. You cannot base how much you pay for health insurance on how unhealthy you are, how much you weigh none of those metrics. For us it's like look, we've got the metrics that we're looking at. Our average age is 34. So it's a young population. The BMI is somewhere between four and five points lower than the national average. Our number one group of people are entrepreneurs and freelancers who come in and join us, and so I'm looking at all these metrics. I'm saying we just got a healthy group of people. Every month, it's like 30% of the crowdfunding requirements is pregnancies and somewhere around 25% is active injuries, and then the rest is a little smattering of illnesses and wellness visits and things like that. So it is very, very clear our members are having lots of babies and they're having lots of active injuries, which for me, I don't know about you, but I'm happy to help people out with babies and active injuries. Yeah, god bless you. Go reproduce and stay active. That's what our country needs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally so interesting. Okay, I've got one more question about the conventional kind of system before we really deep dive into what you're doing, and this is on the doctor side. If I ask any doctor, what's the biggest gripe? What, what part of your job?
Speaker 1:Yeah, blows the same answer pretty much from everybody is like my job requires my 40 hours and then I spend another 20 doing insurance BS, like I can't remember what the number of staff that's required at a doctor's office. If it was just for taking care of you, it would be like a receptionist and a doctor and a nurse and it's. It's bigger than that. Again, I don't know what the numbers are. I'm sure you do, but three to one, basically three.
Speaker 2:Three billing people for every doctor.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness, can you explain how that side of things works in the conventional medical system, on the doctor's end of things, how they get paid, what incentivizes them, that kind of thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, oftentimes the doctors have to get approval from the health insurance plans to do specific procedures. So you know they they, their EHRs have the ability to ping that health insurance plan and the health insurance plan says yes or no. If the health insurance plan says no, then the doctors are going to call them they got to battle it out and say we really need this. And so, in essence, what the doctors are complaining about is they're saying the health insurance plan is basically practicing medicine, even though they're not licensed to practice medicine, because they're telling us what we can or cannot do with our, with our patient, and so then, if they said they can do it, then they actually have to bill it, which, like I said, you have three people to actually get the paperwork from the doctor's office to the, to the health insurance plan. Plus, the doctor has to spend a bunch of time on doing that. And so you know what? What would happen if you could show up and pay them with their credit card, where you get paid immediately, you don't have to get approval for it, you get the cash right away and you're getting charged what? A percent and a half or two percent or something like that on credit card fees as opposed to having to spend 30% of your time. You know, dealing with health insurance plans and a big, big chunk of money. You know, in essence, what happens in that scenario is doctors shot can charge now 30 or 40% less for the same procedure if you show up with credit card, versus them having to to bill health insurance. So you know that's what we're trying to leverage at.
Speaker 2:Crowd health is saying like let's, let's enable our people to pay in cash because doctors freaking hate health insurance, like every single doctor I talked to there. When I they say, hey, what do you do? I was like I'm trying to replace health insurance. They're like God bless you, please Can I invest? Like what, what is it going to take? What is it going to take? Because, if you're, if you're thinking about this, right, like the fact that I have to ask somebody else if I can do my job, which I've been trained to do for you know, in many cases, these doctors 10, 12, 14 years of school, you know, in residencies and things like that, it is, it's it? That would be annoying, like if, if somebody sat on your shoulder and told you how to run your podcast, you'd be like dude, this is my podcast, don't tell me how to run it.
Speaker 2:Like, let me do my thing. If somebody shadowed my shoulder and told me how to be a CEO, I'd be like dude, like let me run, run my company, you know. And so the doctors hate that crap. They hate it and they're like if the sooner you can get health insurance out of my life, the better, is there a way that I can transition all the way to cash pay and get rid of health insurance completely? Most doctors would love that. That situation.
Speaker 1:That really surprised me and I only really learned that from being uninsured. My wife has had some blood work done and a few other little things here and there and it's like you tell somebody you know the receptionist like we don't have health insurance. They're like oh, you can pay cash and here's a discount, and like you can get new prescriptions for way cheaper. It's like how does that make any sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. Well, there's a Psyop that is going on that people think that these insurance plans are actually fighting for you, that they're actually getting you really great rates, and the reality of that is that's just false. That's a false narrative. It's a myth. You can, 95 times out of 100, get significantly better rates by showing up with a credit card than paying with with your health insurance plan. Just that's a fact, and now I have thousands of bills to prove it.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Okay, so let's talk about your company. Tell us, like kind of brass tax, how does this work? How do you run this business and run it successfully? How does it work for the person you know paying into this? How does it work for somebody who's trying to receive money from this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we'll take the example of a single person. A single person will pay crowd health two times per month. The first time is 50 bucks. That 50 bucks per person comes to crowd health. It pays all of our bills. That's the only revenue that we get, and the reason we do that is because we want it to be very transparent what money we get and what money goes to other people in the community, because one of the things we have trouble with with health insurance is there is no transparency, and so we take our 50 bucks. That's the only place in which we touch the money.
Speaker 2:There's another additional up to $125 that you are going to send to another person in the community who has a health event. So let's just say, casey, he's out running, playing, you know, soccer or whatever, tears his ACL and it's. He goes to orthopedic surgeon. Orthopedic surgeon says you know what, casey, this is a bad one, it's going to be $22,000. Casey calls crowd health and says hey, I tore my ACL. My orthopedic surgeon thought it thinks it's going to be a $22,000 surgery, and so he said Okay, let us negotiate with him.
Speaker 2:This actually happened in Austin Not too long ago. Acl $22,000, was it? So we called the orthopedic surgeon. We said, hey, if we pay you and if our member pays you in cash on the day of the surgery, will you give them a discount? He's like, yeah, I'll give you them a discount. And so I said, okay, well, would you consider doing it not in the hospital but in the surgery center? He's like, yeah, I'll do it in the surgery center. And so how much would it be if we paid you or if our member paid you in cash and you did it at a surgery center? He said, well, that would be about $12,000. So we called in one hour not even one hour, it's more like a 15 minute conversation got that bill from $22,000 to $12,000. Casey would pay the first 500. We would submit the remaining $11,500 to, let's just say, 115 people for $100 each.
Speaker 2:And so if those people say, yes, I'll help out Casey, then that $100 goes from their bank account to Casey's bank account and ultimately, at the end of the day, casey will have enough in his bank account to go and pay for that, that ACL tear. So, in essence, what we're doing is we're crowdfunding your ACL tear from a group of people who have raised their hand and said If anybody in the community has a health event, I'm willing to help. So we present you one opportunity a month to help somebody out in the community. You can say yes, you can say no. If you say yes, then we'd transfer that money. If you say no, we move on to the next person until we figure out a way to get Casey his money.
Speaker 2:Like I said, we've had somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 bills that have been submitted. Everyone submitted to the community has gotten paid. Like every bill that the community had the ability to fund got paid, and this is from $50 pediatric visit to hundreds of thousands of dollars and a brain hemorrhage member, and so that's the way that it works. It's so different than health insurance I'm sure there's questions on it, but it has worked like so incredibly well.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's amazing. Okay, so first of all, I guess, a question on the negotiation. So part of what I'm paying crowd health for is to be able to negotiate with the provider to be able to bring that cost down. You guys probably have learned tons of stuff on how to do that, like, for example, the hospital versus the surgical center. I didn't know there was a difference between the two. It's a huge difference in cost. But explain that. What the hell's the difference? Where are the surgeries done?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the surgery centers are such a beautiful thing because one nobody likes to go to a hospital. It smells bad, it feels bad especially post COVID crap. Nobody wants to be in a hospital. The surgery centers look more like, you know, western hotels than they do hospitals. You know they are set up specifically to do outpatient surgeries, which is the vast majority of surgeries that are done. So any outpatient surgery which means you have the surgery and you leave, you don't stay Although there are some that do inpatient they're able to do it at probably 40% less, sometimes 50 or 60% less, than the hospital is willing to do it for. And so that's the beauty of doing it at a surgery center. So it's same doctor, same anesthesiologist, just you're doing it at a surgery center instead of a hospital. Significantly less, tons of savings there.
Speaker 1:Are the scalpels 50% worse or 50% less sharp or something? No, it takes.
Speaker 2:Well, a couple of things is surgery centers typically only take cash, so you have to pay in cash, and so that takes a bunch of the bureaucratic BS out of the hospital system. And then the hospitals basically, what they're trying to do is they're trying to do everything under one roof for everybody, and it's just not an efficient model Like the surgery centers. Let's just let's say it this way what if a car manufacturer in Tesla probably is going to prove me wrong here what if a car manufacturer tried to manufacture the tires, the engines, the windshield wipers, the doors, the windows, everything within one building? It becomes very inefficient because the people who are really good at making glass for the windows are not necessarily really good at making the tires for the wheels, and so the same thing that happens within, I think, hospitals is like these hospitals try to do everything under one roof and they think it's going to be way more efficient. But in essence, what it does is it does not allow you to specialize in one thing.
Speaker 2:So let's look at it in a different way. Would you prefer to have a surgeon that does four ACL surgeries a day, or would you prefer a surgeon who does four ACL surgeries a month or a year. The surgeon who does four ACL surgeries a day. They do 100 a month and they have seen all the complications. They've seen lots of ACLs and so they're just going to be better at it, they're going to be faster at it, there's going to be less complications and so it's just a cheaper environment to do. That is you have some specialists who can do this, and a lot of times they do that within surgery centers. So that's the reason why surgery centers are super inexpensive. But the primary reason is the billing is way less, the administration is way less than these big bureaucratic hospitals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the overnight stay is a thing too, right? Usually the hospitals will try to get you to stay like two or three nights afterwards, when that's usually not necessary. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. I mean, I'll give you a perfect example, and this just happened to me. So, for people who are following on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, a couple of weeks ago I was hospitalized and went to the ER. They thought I had a stroke of all things. By the two hours in, they realized it wasn't a stroke, it was a complex migraine. But they decided to keep me overnight just to make sure. Well, that overnight visit was really really expensive, as you can imagine.
Speaker 2:Right before I left, the physical therapist and the occupational therapist came in and they said hey, we just want to make sure that you're OK so that you can go home safely. And I was like what do you mean? I was like you guys told me I had a migraine and they're like, yeah, this is just a formality, and I go OK, fine, can you put on these pair of socks and can you brush your teeth? And what would watch you? And I was like, great, so they're chatting with my wife. I put on a pair of socks, I brush my teeth. And they said we walked down the hall 20 feet. So I walked down the hall 20 feet. I came back. They were there for 10 minutes.
Speaker 2:They billed me six 15-minute visits. Each one was between $300 and $400. So it was about $2,000 worth of bills that they billed me for a formality at the end of my complex migraine visit. And so I'm like what the hell? Like you know, like and so, given I'm responsible ultimately for this bill, like I'm calling the hospital and crowd health will do this on my behalf. If I asked them to be like what the hell? You charged me $2,000 for this visit that you know it lasted 10 minutes. It doesn't make any sense as a formality. So you know we get involved in those things and help you walk you through these bills to say, hey, you know, did they? What do they do here? What do they do here? And so we can kind of walk you through that bill and we'll find stuff that is bogus and, and you know, fight with the hospital on your behalf. So that's the service that we provide.
Speaker 1:That's yeah, that's amazing, and thank you for explaining the difference. Like you know, surgeons and hospital systems and that you know, I guess, more like the surgical centers I think of it like, would I rather have a plate of pasta from the cheesecake factory that has pretty much every cuisine on the planet, or whether would I rather go to Franklin's in order to risk it, when they do a thousand pounds of brisket every single day, I think I'll end up in the line of at Franklin's.
Speaker 2:That's a perfect example. Yeah, that's a perfect example.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. Ok now, you also mentioned something interesting earlier where you said there was a limit of for an individual. It's a limit of one hundred twenty five dollars. Does that mean if I'm paying in? My monthly rate might be variable depending on what is needed in the community, but it will never exceed that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it won't exceed one twenty five. So this month we're asking for a hundred. I think next month will be a little bit lower than that and it's, in its variable, based upon, you know, what is going on in the community that month. So this month we had a couple of nikkie babies, we have a non Hodgkin's lymphoma case, like we had some some legit you know cases this month. So we had to bump it up a little bit and I don't foresee that happening next month. I think it's going to come down a little bit. So it does.
Speaker 2:You know, what we say is for people is like budget for one twenty five and then, if it's less than that, celebrate. You know, go and take your you know wife or or husband or whatever, out to dinner, or, you know, invest in Bitcoin, or, you know, do whatever you want with that money, because we're never going to ask for it again. It's yours. Keep it wherever you want, spend it, save it, whatever you want to do. We're never going to ask for that. So we only ask for people to help for the events that happen in that month, and so that's that's why it's a little bit variable and some people are kind of like oh, you know, I wish it was just the same every month.
Speaker 2:I might look budget for one twenty five and celebrate if it's less. Yeah, you know, you just got. You just got got free money. And so you know, and most of the times health insurance plans they keep that extra money. They put it in a big pool which, you know, with inflation and the value of that is going down. They will sometimes invest it and get interest off it and all that kind of stuff. And guess what? You don't get that. The health insurance plan gets that. And so we're like and you keep your money, you do what you want, you get benefit from that, as opposed to you know any, any corporation getting benefit from that. Yeah, interesting.
Speaker 1:OK. So if I'm paying in, do I know exactly where my dollars are going? So, like if I it's you know October, the fee is 100 bucks this month. Do I know that I'm helping Tony in Cincinnati or do I know that I'm helping the community at large?
Speaker 2:It goes into a pool that pays out all the claims evenly and yeah, great question, Great question and so, I think, our biggest differentiator versus health insurance. And so we will send you an email once a month. It's going to be converted to our app here in the next couple of months, but we'll send you an email, We'll say that you know a, a, a mail in Salt Lake City, tour his ACL, and he is requesting you know $100 or whatever for you know his ACL and so you can. You can set up that setting to say you know, automatically approve that or automatically deny that or whatever. So there's some settings in the back end that allow you to automate some of those things, but you know exactly where you're 100 bucks Just go in that month and so you know. As opposed to sending it to this big corporation, United Healthcare, where you have no idea where it's going, your money is going directly from Casey to Andy or Mary or Amy or whatever to help them with their their health event. We do not get in the middle of it, we don't touch it. It's a peer to peer transaction and that's a super cool thing.
Speaker 2:One quick story is we had a woman which one should I tell, Because there's so many?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, a few months ago we had probably six or nine months ago.
Speaker 2:By this time we had a woman who had a miscarriage and had some complications and had some medical expenses, and so we sent out a request and we had a bunch of women I think there was like three or four that responded and said hey, you know, this is a part of my story too. I had a miscarriage. I know what this family is going through. You know, can I, instead of $100, can I give her $200 because I want to help in any way that I can? I mean, like I was blown away because I was like never in a million years would you, you know, call your health insurance plan and say can I give an extra $100 this month? Like it just wouldn't happen, you know. But what the way that we say is we say fund humans, not health insurance, Like your money is funding other human beings as opposed to big funding, big health insurance corporations. And so we think that's the beauty of this kind of peer to peer funding and it's very, very different than you know, sending a check to United Health Care.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a really good segue. I was going to ask you what have you learned about the community as far as giving goes Like maybe I don't give a shit about Tony in Cincinnati and whatever he has going on in his health life have you found it's like maybe 50-50 that people pay and don't pay, or is the percentage way higher?
Speaker 2:Way higher. It's like 98% say yes Because it's like, look, I mean, it's hard to say no to another human being who's asking for help, right, it really is. It's like I want to. You know, will you please help me? No, I'm not going to help you with your, you know, your pregnancy or your torn ACL or your face bike plant, face bike plant. And so most people say, yes, you know.
Speaker 2:And there is actually, you know, if I'm requesting something from the community, you get to know, you get to know who I am by by with two, two, two things. One is you'll know if I'm a good member of the community. So, if I've been asked the 10 times, you know, have I said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Or if I said no, no, no, no, no, no, you'll see that in my request. So you'll know if I'm a good member of the community, right, and so that's helpful, like everybody wants to be a good member of the community. And the other thing you'll find out is like, is my bill a reasonable bill? Like, did I treat your money who I'm asking, you know, for money, like it's my own money, or did I just go out and get whatever? You know the most expensive doctor on the planet who may not be very good, and I don't like give a shit if it costs 5,000 or 50,000, somebody else is paying for it, you know. And so that's those are two things that you know about the community that that does help manage the the behavior a little bit, okay, um, so I think that's important.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing, real quick too, is um, we have built a community. I mean, if people feel like they're a part of something you know, and that's cool, because when you're with health insurance and something goes wrong, you think the health insurance is trying to screw you at least I do Um, you know it feels like they're, they're, they're, I'm in battle with my health insurance to get this thing paid, and so we tried to suck as much value out of the system as possible, whereas with us, like we're in a community of people and it's like if you're trying to screw the system, you're just screwing other human beings, like it's much harder to screw other human beings than it is to screw a big health corporation. That doesn't feel like they give a shit about you, right? And so, um, we've had lots of people come back and and be like we had a guy with colon cancer who's like man, I got colon cancer. This is bad, I know, but please will you help me find you know really great providers at a low cost, because I don't want to screw the community.
Speaker 2:You know most people if they had colon cancer they'd be like screw the community I'm. I'm worried about myself, right, like um, and I was like I was blown away. I was just like wow, like there is behavior change here, because they know like if they behave, you know, badly it, it, it doesn't impact a company, it impacts a group of people. That's that's hard to do. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the visibility on the claim is really interesting. It's almost like an Airbnb or an Uber, where it's like I'm not going to book a place that's got two stars on Airbnb, and it goes both ways Right. The person with the Airbnb can then rank the person who's going to stay there and vice versa, and so you have good visibility. Is this a good guest? Is this a good host? You kind of understand those things, um, and it reminds me too I. So a few weeks ago, I just joined this new kind of gym to train my people in the wintertime, and it's a couple of the on it and it's in a warehouse and it's open 24 seven, but it's only the two of them that run the thing, and so they're only there 12 hours and they've got cameras and things like that. But, like you, you can go there and not pay. You could go there and steal all the supplements that are out for anybody, and, and what it creates is this huge amount of trust and ownership in the members.
Speaker 1:The members love it, they're all super happy and positive and optimistic and they they self-regulate everything Like if you go there and you're a douchebag, like it's not going to fly with these members. They feel like they're loved and trusted, they're on a first name basis with the owners and vice versa, and so it regulates itself, and it sounds like this system is almost exactly the same way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean totally. I mean it is. It is the same way and and you know, we just have story after story where people have stepped up for the community and it's a beautiful thing. It really is kind of fun to be a part of the, the community, because it it does feel like we're all a part of the, the similar tribe which is.
Speaker 2:You know, the people who are in our community are generally like I'm falling to one of three groups.
Speaker 2:They're either Keto-Karnivore people because we've made some big strides and that's me, that's who I am.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the people who are in our group share characteristics with me, because it's what I'm passionate about. Keto-karnivore people, they're Bitcoin people, who generally are significantly more healthy than the national average. Or they are kind of an alternative medicine type group, which is kind of like a holistic, naturopathic kind of crew who don't like Western medicine or antifarma, which those are three characteristics of me too, and so I just am naturally drawn to those folks and so that's who's become a part of our community. But each one of those groups have some overlap, which I think is they know that the big institutions are not in it to see them thrive, they're in it to make a ton of money and reap the rewards of denying claims and taking your money from you and just having you with vaccines and stuff, and so our tribe overlaps in a lot of different ways. They're like man, this is one of my people, I don't wanna screw them, and so it's a cool thing to be a part of.
Speaker 1:So in the community, will I actually get to know the other people, Like again, will Tony and Cincinnati? Do I communicate with him? Do I see his picture? Do I know about his life or do I just like see his name and see how many times he's contributed before I decide to contribute or not?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you see that first. But I mean I would say we've got a great community on social, so you get to meet people on social. I was at a conference back man, when was it May, I think May, june and we had a happy hour where I think 125 or 130 crowd health members came out to our happy hour, and so I mean I love some of the ideas actually that you just threw out, like how do we continue to build community in a way that does promote good behavior and all the other great things that come along with community? So if anybody else has any ideas out there, definitely hit me up on Twitter or somewhere and let me know, because I'd love some more ideas on how we can continue to build this community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an interesting question and I just think you'd get so much more buy-in. I mean, you know what it's like to attend a conference and you've seen people, you've heard people, you get to meet them, and all of a sudden it's like, wow, these are all my buds, like this is great, you're way more likely to support them or appear on podcasts and things like that.
Speaker 1:So, I wonder if you've noticed a trend, or you maybe even expect a trend. It's more and more people join, I imagine more and more people join in those communities Keto Carnivore who typically again, maybe some injuries, pregnancies, but really are not experiencing a lot of cost as far as chronic health goes. Do you imagine that over time, as your numbers grow of people that are actually healthy, do you think the cost will kind of trend downwards over time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I mean. I think that ultimately what ends up happening is people do age up with you, right, like, if I join and I'm 44, so I joined when I was 40 or 41. And so if I'm with crowd health for another 10 years, I will be more likely to have health events 10 years from now than I do today. Just, it's unfortunately the fact of aging. But so people do tend to age up with us and so costs will go up, but costs will go up much lower, at a much lower rate than health insurance, because we're able to keep those rates down so significantly.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a quick example we have a woman who needs brain surgery, and so her local neurosurgeon said it was gonna be $68,000. And there was a hospital, like an excellent hospital, like 20 miles down the road that was willing to do it for like $24,000. And this is what the neurosurgeon that is highly acclaimed neurosurgeon was willing to do it for much, much lower. And so it's like things like that that if we can continue to keep those big costs down, we think that the costs will be relatively flat. They'll go up a little bit, but relatively flat and way, way slower growth than health insurance. I talked to a buddy just last week who runs a company is like his health insurance is going up 20% next year. That's just not sustainable.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. Wow. Okay, so there are brackets for age. Then you age into different brackets and then pay a little more. Pay a little more based on what your predictive costs are gonna be. Is anybody not accepted in the program?
Speaker 2:Two groups of people. One if you're over 240, then you are not accepted. We make exceptions for really, really tall people. If you are a smoker, then you are not accepted. So those are the only two reasons why we wouldn't accept you into the community. Gotcha, okay, wow.
Speaker 1:Is there anything I haven't asked you that you want to explain?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. The only other thing is we do have a limit on what the community will, what we'll submit to the community on preexisting conditions. So if you have a big preexisting condition, we just don't think it's fair for you to jump in and stick that with other people. And so what we do for that is say you can come in and you own your own preexisting condition and then, once you're a part of the community and shown that you're a part of the community, then you can start submitting preexisting conditions to the community. But it's after two years. So you have to own your own preexisting condition. So that's the only preexisting condition after two years and that's the other one that trips people up a little bit.
Speaker 2:So you can't jump in if you're pregnant, have a baby, stick the community with a $15,000 bill and then take off again. Like you actually have to be a part of the community to be able to do that. So that's the only other thing. Pregnancies we basically say that if your due date is less than 300 days from when you start, then that's not eligible for funding. So, like I said, you just can't jump in and have your baby, then jump back out. So 300 days is basically gestation period plus a couple of weeks, and so it's pretty close. But if you're already pregnant, that's the one where we'll negotiate the bills for you. But we're not submitting that to the community for funding, I see, and I guess I'm assuming you're not doing anything related to like fertility treatments or things like that.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just the pregnancy itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's on your own. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay. Well, I didn't think Netflix could get me interested in racing cars and Formula One, and it did. I didn't think I'd ever be interested in health insurance and you've gotten me interested in health insurance. It's so fascinating. What a great system and I wanna make a pivot here. I have lots of people try to explain this to me and I know it's in your wheelhouse, so maybe you can get me excited about this as well. I have to give a shout out to my client, garrett Gunderson, who writes about finances. He wrote the book Disrupting Sacred Cows. That has an entire chapter that's all about blockchain and Bitcoin, and that was one of the better explanations I've gotten about how any of that works. It's still very confusing to me. Do you have a way to explain what Bitcoin is and how people use it? Like what is it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think people try to go down the rabbit hole on this and try to understand kind of the mechanics of how it all works. But I just say it's this Most of what we do on a day-to-day basis is electronic money. I can go look in my pocket and I probably have $5 or something in my wallet, so most of the time it's electronic money. So that's really not a lot different than Bitcoin. You transfer money around electronically. The great thing about Bitcoin is there's no government in between making sure that who sends it and who receives it and what they're doing with it and all this kind of stuff. So you get the government intervention out of that.
Speaker 2:I think the big thing, at least for me, on Bitcoin is we have printed in this money trillions of dollars over the last few years. I think it's something like half of the money supply has been created in the last decade or something like that, and as such, we're seeing inflation skyrocket. Things are more expensive now than they were just two or three years ago, and so if you have more money in the system with the same amount of goods or a similar amount of goods being purchased, those goods that you're purchasing, the cost of those are going to rise, like that's what we're seeing, but it's this government who continues to push out money, to print money, to pay for things that wars and benefits for people and entitlements and all these kinds of things. It is devaluing money and that's the problem that I have, like the money I make this year is going to be worth significantly less next year. The difference with Bitcoin is that the amount of Bitcoin never changes, right, so you cannot introduce more Bitcoin into the system and therefore there is no inflationary impact on Bitcoin. And if you think about it, if there's a limited number of Bitcoin available, then if the government was on a Bitcoin standard, like they're buying in Bitcoin, you can't have these huge deficits that we're currently having to fund all these things that we don't want to fund because it's impossible.
Speaker 2:With being on a Bitcoin standard, just like in the 1970s, when we were on a gold standard, we could not spend more than the gold that we had, and so it kept the government from having huge deficits. It was illegal to have these deficits. Change that in the 70s. As such, we've pretty much been in deficit for the last 20 years, right, and I think that's going to have a massive detrimental impact on the economy me, my kids, my kids' kids and I think it's ultimately going to take down the dollar. And so I'm investing in Bitcoin because I think the dollar is going to be dethroned from being the world currency, just like every other world currency in the history of man has been dethroned at some point, primarily because of over printing of that money, and I think the United States dollar is gonna it's gonna happen to the United States dollar too in the next 10 to 20 years, my guess.
Speaker 1:I mean what you're describing like that system cannot be sustainable. Like trying to think of what the end game of that is gonna be is not great. You see that happen in South American countries all the time where they have to switch currencies because the other one is crash, inflation is like through the roof. It happened in Brazil when I was living there. It's insane, Wow.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right, and I think the United States currency is going to go the way of some of those other currencies. Everybody looks at the British pound and they say well, the British pound, british pound has been around for I don't know what is 1500 years or something like that 2000 years. The problem with that is the British pound has also gotten devalued by 90% over the last 100 years, and so the British pound lost its status as the world currency too, and so what would happen to the United States dollar if they lost 90% of its values? We would all be toast, and so that's why, for me, I hold, probably right now, 25 or 30% of my net worth in Bitcoin, because I think it's gonna go up, and if it's a great hedge, I think, against the dollar, which I think is gonna go down. So that's why I hold Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. How would you recommend dummies like me get started? They're not really into finances or currency, like. What would you recommend as far as, like, getting into this space?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean some people are like very purist about this, like and not to get into too many details, but I think you should just go on like strike is one of my favorites. So go on strike and you know you can buy Bitcoin off of stripe. You can leave it or strike STRI KE. You can buy it on strike and just leave it there, and it's if you do want to use your Bitcoin to buy something. It's super easy to do off of strike, almost as easy as using a credit card. So go to strike. You know, put, put a little bit in Bitcoin and you know, at a minimum, just put a little bit in there. I think it's going to go up. You know many, many, many fold over the next you know five to 10 years, and so put a little bit in there and play with it and try it. I think it's going to be a pretty significant you know player and how we transact funds, you know, in the future.
Speaker 1:Wow, amazing. Well, thank you for that explanation. One of the more chilling things I've heard on our podcast is having Dr Thomas Saferi come on and tell us that cancer is a revenue creating disease. Cancer is a revenue creating disease chilling. And he said the system will never change until there's a financial incentive to change it. We need entrepreneurs to find ways to somehow financially incentivize metabolic health treatments for cancer, otherwise they're never going to see the light of day because they don't generate nearly as much revenue. I just think of your work as being an entrepreneur finding a different system, a different way of going about things is just absolutely wonderful. I love what you're doing. I'm definitely going to be signing up and I can't wait to be a part of the community.
Speaker 2:Thanks, I appreciate that it's nice.
Speaker 1:It's cool to think that I am helping somebody else and if something were to happen to me, that I might get that support as well. So really appreciate you and your work and taking time out of your day to come on our show today. Andy, where would you like people to go to find you and connect with you and your work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, joy Crowd Health. Join CrowdHealthcom is our website. Go check that out. You know, the great thing about it if you want to sign up, is it takes like five minutes, and so it's super easy. It is not one of these long Obamacare you got to go get your W2 forms and things like that. It takes five minutes. We'd love for you all to join us. We're at Join Crowd Health on all the major social media platforms as well, so we're probably most active on Twitter. So if you're on Twitter, come in and check us out.
Speaker 2:We get a little sassy about what's going on in our healthcare system, and so it's for nothing else. Come over for a little healthcare sassiness. I think a lot of people, especially as this airs, are thinking about health insurance and what they're going to do for next year. All we ask is go and check out Join Crowd Health and schedule a 15-minute call with us to learn more about what we're up to, because I think when you hear about what we're doing, it's so significantly different and way, way better than health insurance. It's kind of funny.
Speaker 2:One of our members on Twitter it was yesterday or the day before, I can't remember his comment was something like and this was his tweet, so it wasn't even a response to us. Out of the blue, we got this tweet that says it's just so silly how much better crowd health is than health insurance. I just can't even understand it. So it's silly how much better we are than health insurance.
Speaker 2:And then one other quick thing on this, and I forgot to mention it's one of the coolest things as part of the company that, I think, is when you join Crowd Health, you will have a team of two people in crowd health that you can contact at all times. So you've got a group of people. It's not we're not a call center, you're not calling into somebody in India. It's two people that you'll be able to talk to anytime you want that can care for you, and that's a really cool thing because they get to know you, they get to know your family, they get to know what's going on with you and if you have something pop up, you can contact them quickly and they'll get back to you, and that's a really cool thing. So, anyway, come and join the crowd. We'd love to have you.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. I just thought of one more question I want you to explain. Yeah, no, I'm sure Wellness visits Things that people might do like annually. I think it would be important to touch on real quick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, sure. So you can submit one wellness visit up to 300 bucks per year per member and a wellness visit we considered or consider a primary care visit OBGYN, pediatric, dental or vision. So you can use any one of those five once once a year. So up to 300 bucks.
Speaker 1:Very cool, awesome. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I hope to meet you in person eating brisket and watching Formula One at some point.
Speaker 2:We love it, let's do it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I hope to be part of the community and be part of it and, again, just really appreciate you and the work that you're doing. It's really something very awesome and this was a great conversation. So thank you very much, andy, for coming on today. We really appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Casey.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and this has been another episode of Balanced Body Radio. As always, thank you so very much for listening to Balanced Body Radio. I know I say this all the time, but I really do mean it. It has been such a joy to make and produce this podcast and to watch it grow. Our business started in the pandemic in July of 2020 and we started the podcast in October of 2020. So it has been three years now and to see that we have generated over 400,000 downloads worldwide is just simply unbelievable.
Speaker 1:To me, this year in particular has been such a blast to travel to different health conferences and not only meet some of our amazing guests, but also to meet many of you, our listeners and supporters. We really just can't thank you enough. As always, feel free to book a complimentary 30 minute session on our website, which is mybalancedbodycom. On our homepage, there is a book now button where you can find a time to speak with us about health, fitness, nutrition, whatever you like. We've loved chatting with people all over the world and many of you out there to bounce ideas off each other or to try to come up with plans to achieve specific goals, or even if it's just to reach out to introduce yourselves. We would just love to meet you and connect with you there.
Speaker 1:Also, be sure to check out our YouTube channel if you would like to watch these full interviews and also the shorter interviews on more specific topics that are taken from these full interviews. We've gotten really good feedback over there. It's also a really fun way to interact with people who comment. We read and reply to every single YouTube comment we get, so head on over there. If you want to start a conversation and watch these videos, as always. If you haven't already, please leave us a five star rating and review on Apple. It really is the best way to make sure this podcast gets out there to more listeners. We've been able to keep Balanced Body Radio ad-free for three years and really want to continue to do so, and so your five star ratings and reviews are the best way to support us at Balanced Body and support the podcast. Cheers. Thanks again. So very much for listening to Balanced Body Radio.