Tuesday Morning With Justin: Healthcare, Leadership & Life
Tuesday Morning With Justin: Healthcare, Leadership & Life
$100,000 Knee Replacement for "Poor Quality"
I'm frustrated by a recent $100,000 bill my client received for a knee replacement performed at a low-quality facility. I can't help but question how we've normalized this level of waste in our healthcare system. This egregious example highlights everything wrong with healthcare today—the only industry where we blindly follow recommendations without any information about quality or cost.
But there's hope on the horizon. Progressive companies across America are creating a revolutionary healthcare experience for their employees. Picture a fork in the road: one path leads to the familiar landscape of deductibles, co-pays, and maximum out-of-pocket expenses. The other path—the one changing the game—directs employees to high-quality, reasonably-priced providers where they pay absolutely nothing for their care. Zero dollars. From routine dermatology visits to complex procedures like knee replacements, employees can access excellent care without opening their wallets.
This isn't some futuristic fantasy—it's happening now for organizations with 100+ employees. By recapturing the enormous waste in the system (like that $70,000 of unnecessary spending on a single knee replacement), employers can fund their employees' healthcare costs completely. We're eliminating waste while simultaneously improving access to quality care. If you're tired of watching healthcare costs spiral out of control, share this message with company leaders and decision-makers in your network. Together, we can transform healthcare from a burden into a benefit that truly serves people without breaking the bank.
Music by Alex Lambert.
Contact Justin via text 740-525-5259 or via email JFutrell@TrueNorthCompanies.com
I welcome the opportunity to hear your feedback from this episode!
Thanks again to my musically gifted friend Alex Lambert for the music. Also thanks to Kevin Asehan for the edits.
Welcome to another Tuesday morning with Justin. I'm Justin Futrell, benefit Advisor at True North Companies, and today, well, I promised that I would paint the picture of what's possible in the healthcare landscape. But before I do, I got to share. I am a little frustrated right now. I'm a little frustrated because a claim just came in for one of my client's employees, and it's a knee replacement in Fort Collins that exceeded $100,000 for a knee replacement. Now, if this was the best knee replacement in the world, okay, I might be able to wrap my head around it, but it is a place that has a poor quality rating. So not only do we pay three times more than we needed to for a knee replacement, but also it's a poor quality rating. How long will we continue to let people go to poor quality facilities and pay egregious prices for it? It doesn't make sense. Healthcare is the only industry where you and I are sent recommendations to places to go, and we have no idea whether that's truly a good recommendation or not when it comes to either quality or cost. Fired up, it's disheartening. But let me turn to the more hopeful future and paint this picture of what's possible.
Speaker 1:What is happening today in the healthcare landscape around the country. What is possible, team? If we think about a path right, maybe visualize a fork in the road Okay, if you want to go left, if you want to go left, that's the way you've always went and you can keep going that way. You'll pay your deductible, you'll pay your co-pays, you'll pay your out of pocket maximum. But if you choose to go to the right, if you choose to go to the right, this is a world where we know quality, we know cost and we will steer you on a nicely paved road to high quality, reasonably priced places of care. That means, if you need a dermatology visit, go wherever you want to and pay your normal payments. If you choose to go this way to a dermatologist that's good quality and reasonably priced, we'll actually pay for every dime that that costs. You pay zero dollars. You need an x-ray, you need an MRI, you need a knee replacement. If you take the advice of a good quality, reasonably priced place of care, you pay zero0.
Speaker 1:It's just not that difficult. If you're a company with 100 employees or more. We can simplify things so much and give people free healthcare. It sounds absurd, but we can give people free healthcare. How? Because if we don't pay attention, we get charged $100,000 for a knee replacement that $70,000 of waste right there. That's how we can give money back to employees and pay for the actual costs of copays and deductibles, just by steering them to high quality, reasonably priced places of care.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hanging with me today. Encourage you to give us I don't know, this might be a bad day to ask for a five-star review, I'm not sure Subscribe, it helps us grow the show. Feel free to share this with a friend or a leader who runs their own company or is a part of their company's health plan, because what we wanna do is create this world where we're eliminating waste in the healthcare system, and I believe that we can help take care of a hell of a lot of people in that process by giving employees options of free healthcare good healthcare that's no cost to them. All right team.
