Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/27/26 Andy Schoonover on Fixing the Healthcare System Without Waiting for Politicians

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Scott interviews Andy Schoonover, the CEO of CrowdHealth, about the business he started to offer an alternative to our terrible government-warped healthcare market. Discussed on the show: CrowdHealth “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us” (Time Magazine) Andy Schoonover is the Founder and CEO of CrowdHealth.  Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. It's the babies I'm anxious. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. All right, you guys. Welcome to the show. This is a bit of a departure. We've got a sponsor as a guest for this one, a short interview,

but just to introduce new sponsor of the show and explain what it's all about. It's Andy Schoonover from Crowd Health. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate you joining us on the show. So I got a not very interesting, a little bit of a backstory about

crowd health, which is, I don't know if it was you or somebody from crowd health when it was brand new, came to me and said, hey, you need a sponsor for your show there. And I was writing one book or another at the time. I don't remember what it was, but I was extremely deadliney at the time. And I just said, man, I don't have the time or energy to devote to investigating this thing and finding out what it's really all about and not one about for something big and important that I don't really understand. And then my original understandings, I guess, were misunderstandings

about the way that it worked and it sounded kind of weird. And that was why I thought, man, I'm really going to have to be. But so anyway, what I should have did was just, should have done, was just called Tom Woods because he had been dealing with you guys from some time back around. 2021. Yeah. So I should have just talked to Tom and had him explain to me because I think, well, see, now it's the few.

and I've got what Biden's got, and I can't remember anything, but I think maybe I did finally call Tom and ask him to explain to me. And then I says, oh, that is what happened. Yeah, yeah. And I says to him, oh, that makes perfect sense. So yeah, I think I'll do that. And of course, what happened was, just like with everybody else, the price of health insurance in my household doubled with the turn of the new year.

And I just absolutely had to seek out another choice. So finally, I went to Tom and he explained it. And I decided, okay, I'm going to sign up for that, which I did. And then I thought, well, geez, maybe I should advertise for them too if it's such a good thing deal. So it's not insurance. What is it if it ain't insurance? Crowd help. Tell us.

Yeah, well, we're super, it's super fun to have Tom as members. Anybody who's a fan of Tom knows that he just had a baby and that baby was born, you know, with crowd health. And it worked out, you know, great for them. and so we're just excited to have another crowd health member in the crew after his latest was born. I don't know how many he's up to now, but he's got a, he's got at least a starting basketball team, I think. I think that's six. And his first son, too, I know he's really happy. Man, that's awesome.

But yeah, look, you know, ultimately, I'll give you a quick backstory because I think it gives some context. You know, this is my second healthcare company. I sold my first one. I didn't have health insurance because most of us get health insurance to our employers. And so I went to what I thought was my only option, which was the first. Affordable Care Act plan. And to keep a long story short, you know, I was paying $1,200 for me,

my wife and my two girls and it worked until I had to use it. My little one was one at the time was having recurring ear infection. So we went to the ear nose and throat doctor who said she's got a hole in her ear drum and it's got to get fixed. So we went to, you know, the only place in network to do that in town, got it fixed, got the bill. It was a 15-minute procedure and got the bill was $8,000. It was like, holy crap, $8,000 for 15 minutes.

Like, this is crazy. but this is what health insurance is for. Like, that's the whole point of having health insurance. And I got a note a few weeks after that for my insurance company that said it was medically unnecessary and so they weren't going to pay for it. And so I went through two rounds of appeals. And at the end of day, they're like, no, we're not paying for it. And I'm like, what?

Like, I had a stroken $8,000 check to get this procedure paid for it. And I had health insurance. And at that point, I was like, screw this. Like, if you guys aren't going to pay my bills, I'm not paying your bill. So I quit. And I looked at my wife and I said, we're uninsured. and she's like, excuse me? And I was like, yeah, I mean, we're going to figure this out.

And so ultimately we started paying directly for our bills, our health care bills. And we were like, people were giving us ridiculous discounts by paying them directly as opposed to them having to go and get paid from an insurance company. I was like, man, I bet if we got a bunch of people together who could help each other pay for big health care expenses, enable them to pay directly, their doctor directly, then we can wickedly reduce the price of health care. And so, you know, that's what we've done. We're, you know, five years in, we'll have our five-year birthday in April.

We have 25,000 members who funded 35,000 bills and everything from, you know, pediatric visits to very serious cancer cases, many, many, many of them. And, you know, our members are getting health care for half to a third of what Obamacare is. I went on in Obamacare this year, and it was going to be $1,400. with I think a $16,000 or $18,000 deductible. At crowd health for my family, I'm paying about $600 per month without a huge deductible. And so it's like I'm saving a shitload of money,

excuse my language, but by getting outside of the system and doing this model as opposed to, you know, the insurance system. So that's the backstory of how I got here. Yeah, but if I just went to government school, doesn't that sound like you're just describing insurance? Everybody kind of chips in to cover each other's bills kind of thing. So your company is insurance in an earlier stage

before it turns into the beast that we know it to be now? It's kind of like insurance back before the 1970s. Because insurance started as just a group of people getting together and helping each other fund big expenses. You know, these communities are like, look, you know, something big happens to one of us. We'll all throw in something and help that person get this paid for. And it goes all the way back to agrarian society.

When you have these, you know, small agrarian towns where if somebody gets hurt, you know, the town would pitch in and come over and plow their fields for them to help that family. And so then you start sticking all these intermediaries into the equation like the government, insurance companies, your employer, and then you disaggregate kind of that process and make it way more expensive. So we are kind of like insurance of 50 or 70 years ago.

The difference between us as an insurance now is that ultimately Scott and Andy are paying the bill. The insurance company is not paying the bill. So when you pay somebody directly without the intermediaries, it is significantly less to process that than if you have a bunch of intermediaries, right, in the middle of things. And so we are taking advantage of ripping out the intermediaries

and getting way better prices. So over 35,000 bills, what we found is our members are getting 50% better prices than United Healthcare. So this is one of the largest companies on the planet. I think it's the seventh or eighth largest company on the planet in United Healthcare. You would think they would be able to get the best bill,

the best price. They don't. because the government has set it up so that insurance companies actually want prices to go up. So the buyers of healthcare, the insurance companies, want the price to go up. The sellers of healthcare, the hospital systems, want the price to go up.

And so if you have the buyer and the seller of healthcare wanting the price to go up, guess what? The price goes up. I mean, it doesn't take a PhD in economics to figure this out, right? And so the government has put their hands all over healthcare and as a result of that have made, the buyers and the sellers want the price to go up. I can explain why if you like,

but that's ultimately what Obamacare did was make it so that everybody in the system wants the price to go up, and so the price keeps going up. There's no market forces in health care driving prices down. And so that's ultimately what we're trying to do is create that market force to drive health care prices down. Right. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I think most people hopefully understand how politicize this sector of the economy

already is. And you can see how there's more demand for socialism because as Mises said that the middle of the road leads to socialism in the middle of the road being government subsidizing some private service type thing, whatever. And now obviously that ultimately just leads to cartilization where supply, which is organized and has lobbyists, uses government to screw over their customers.

In this case, sick patients. And although it'd be the same, if we're talking hardware or anything else where you can get government in the patent system and everything else to come in and all other regulations to exclude competition in favor of the suppliers. You know, obviously that's the way it works.

But so I still need you to help me understand better how this works because you say, I'm paying, but if I get some gigantic bill that I can't afford to pay, then what happens is what you're saying is crowd health pays me and then I pay them. Instead of they just build the insurance. insurance company separately. That's the process. Yeah. So let's just, you know, we can come up with a scenario and I'll use one that's actually happens. We have this woman in Austin who tore her ACL.

She went to the hospital, ER. The ER was like, yep, you tore your ACL. Let's give you to one of the in-system, in-hospital system orthopedic surgeons to fix it for you. The in-hospital orthopedic surgeon was going to do it for $24,000. She calls us and she says, I'm so sorry I just joined crowd health, but I have a surgery that's $24,000. He's saying, hey, let us negotiate it for you. And so we found another guy in town. We know of another guy in town who would, if he was paid at the point of care, so when the patient shows up, they actually pay him, he would do it for $12,000.

And this is a surgeon that does a lot of the joints for the University of Texas athletic program. So he's good. Like, he's a great, great orthopedic surgeon. So just by doing it from the hospital system through, insurance to a direct pay situation, which I'm paying the doctor at the point of care, it's dropped the price by 50%. But that woman still has $12,000 if she's got to find a, how do I get $12,000? Well, crowd health goes to 120 people in our community and says, hey, this woman needs $100.

So you send $100 to this woman. And you can say yes or no, or you can just automate it to say every time you're asked, you say yes. And so if they say yes, then $100 goes from their account to this woman's account. And at the end of the day, this woman's going to have $12,000 in her account so that she can go and then pay that orthopedic surgeon directly at the point of care, getting that really, really good rate. And so then the question is like, and we only ask people in the community once per month.

So Scott as a member of crowd health will only be asked once a month to help somebody else out in the community for a specific amount of money, not to exceed. $140 a month if you're a single person. So we will ask you for up to $140 per month to help somebody else out in the community. But we will only ask for what we need. So for example, this month we're only asking for 85 of that 140 because the community is doing so well,

we don't need all 140 from you. And so that woman has enough to pay for that procedure. She goes, she pays for it, she gets the procedure, and the rest is history. And we've done that now 35,000 times. And it works really, really well. I write this episode of Scott Horton show brought to you by the books I wrote. You can see them behind me there.

Enough already. Fools errant and then enough already and provoked. And then, of course, one might have fallen down there, but I got Ron Paul, the great Ron Paul, Scott Horton Show interviews. And hotter than the sun, see that one back there over there that way. Hotted than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. That's all interviews I did all about nukes and really great stuff. And I blessed my ass on these things.

And you know, I've gotten a really great reception on all of them. They all have been endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg endorsed two of the three I wrote. He would have endorsed the third one I know, but he died too soon, unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that provoked is the definitive account. In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Matte said about it too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. So maybe check that up.

And then if I get in a car wreck and I have cancer and a heart attack and COVID and my bill is you can negotiate it down to $150,000, I still have your guarantee that you're going to figure that out. Well, you have a guarantee that we're- That's the important part of insurance, at least supposedly, as you told in your story, they don't live up to this. But supposedly the point of insurance is, yeah, they promise that they'll have your back when it comes down to it. Yeah, and that's the misconception is they don't promise that they have your back. They want you to think that they promise that you have their back.

But what we do is we- If I got to get things wrong with me, but I'm paying in, then I am good or I'm not. Here's the cool part about what we do. We've got 25,000 people that we send these bills out to, to date, 99.9% of them have gotten funded. So of the 35,000 bills,

99.9% health insurance plans are paying out about 80%. And so we're doing a hell a lot better than health insurance companies of getting these bills paid. And so, you know, the health insurance companies

don't promise they're going to pay your bill. We don't promise that your bill is going to get paid. However, what we do do is we show you the entire history of all the bills that have been submitted to the community and how many of them have gotten paid. And to date, 99.9% of them have gotten paid.

So the question is, is what is the 0.1%? The 0.1% is if I'm asking somebody in the community to help that woman with their torn ACL, they can say yes or no. But if they say no, they have to understand that when they go and ask the community to get help, the community will know that they said no. Right. And so if Scott, if Andy asked Scott for money and Andy has said, no, no, no, no, no to the last 10 times, you know, he's been asked.

The probability Scott is going to ask Andy is very, very low. Like, they remember like, screw you, dude. Like, you haven't helped anybody else. And we just, all we do is we just flag these so that you can kind of preset whether or not you want to fund those. And so it's, it's this game theory kind of that happens within, within the crowd health community. The economics folks will love it.

And that was what it enables 99.9% of these to get, to get totally funded. And so, you know, people want to help because if they have something happen, they want help. And if they don't help, then the probability of them getting helped is significantly lower. Then so the point is the crowd is big enough at this point that no one person has to pay very much, even if, you know, out in the pool, even if the person's medical bills are catastrophically high. in the worst case of being in a permanent coma for the next 25 years or whatever, that it still is affordable. And the system doesn't break down there.

You're saying the only people who don't get funded are the people who refuse to fund themselves. Yeah. I mean, today, that's what's happened. The 29 of the 35,000 bills, those are people who have said no to other people in the community when they've been asked. And so I will be honest with you.

When I first started the company, you know, four and a half, almost five years ago, you know, you ask entrepreneurs what keeps you up at night. What kept me up at night is having a NICU baby or a coma or a cancer case because I only had a thousand people back then as opposed to 25,000. You know, now I get people when I hear about some of these big issues. I actually look forward to being able to help this family, you know, get through whatever they're getting through

because I know we, you know, can get this thing funded by the community. And so, you know, we've had dozens and dozens of candidates. cancer cases and dozens and dozens of Nicky babies. I mean, those are the really expensive ones. You know, we had a guy out hunting or excuse me, fishing, and he had a revolver in his holster. He leaned down to get a fish out of the water. The gun fell out of his holster, hit a rock, went off,

went into his calf, out the back of his calf, into his thigh, out the top of his thigh, into his chest and out the back. You know, this was the middle of Montana where he had to get, you know, medevacked out from a little creek and nowhere, Montana, two hours away from the nearest hospital. You know, that was a million dollar, a million dollar bill. And that got, got fully funded by the community without a problem.

And so we've had some of these big bills. And the cool part about this is that, you know, you see these four or five million dollars from, you know, these health insurance plans. They're bogus. I mean, they're bogus bills. These are, you know, fake prices that health insurance plans tell you because they want to look like the heroes. In a reality, it's very, very unusual to have a $4 or $5 million bill that's real,

especially once you negotiate it down. So those things just don't happen. They're very, very rare. And even if they did within crowd health, it would be, you know, funded because those bills also take, you know, six or 12 months to play out. You know, it's a big cancer case or a big NICU baby or whatever. So you have a long period of time to pay that thing out. It's not like you need to come up with $5 million tomorrow.

Yeah. You know, there's this journalist, I think it's Stephen Brill. He used to have his own magazine. I forget why I hate him now. Maybe he's really bad on Ukraine or something like that. But he had this super long, like 50,000 word article or something all about the rigging of medical prices. And then the different menus, the different priceless. Like every hospital has their insurance company price list. But then the other one that if you tell them that, hey, we know that there's a. regulation that says that you have to have the real menu with the real prices on the cash basis and negotiable and whatever because there are regulations like that. It's just they count on people not knowing about it, whatever. And that if you call them out, that was one part of it. If you call

them out, they have to admit that, oh yeah, there's actually an entire different scheduled prices for all our procedures. That's way, way lower and all of that. Sure, people can still find that. It's probably be worth to reread myself. The way they work is it's like going into a cardiolorship and you want to buy a Toyota Corolla or something. And they're like, well, a Toyota Corolla is $100,000, but I'm going to give you a 75% discount. And I'm going to sell it to you for $25,000. You know, like, dude, $100,000 price is a bullshit price anyway. Right.

That's not a real price. Like you're saying, just talking with the real prices. Yeah, the insurance company will pay it, though, because they don't mind. They're getting a kickback from the government for every penny they lose, you know, so they're doing all right. Well, let me tell you the craziness of, of, uh, healthcare. And this is like, I know your audience is no fan of government, neither am I. You know, well, basically what they did is what they said is, listen, health insurance plans,

you can only make 15% profit on the premiums that people pay, right? So if I'm paying $1,000, you can only make $150. And so for most people that sounds, oh, that's, you know, that's fantastic because we can't let health insurance, you know, people gouge us. But if you think about that, if you have a thousand dollar premium and they can only make $150, how do they grow their profit by 10%. How do they go from $150 to $165? Well, your premium, your premium has to go up from $1,000 to $1,100. So as your premiums go up, as the prices of health care go up, health insurance plans are actually making more money. It's not too different from the military industrial complex versus cost plus system. They're like, hey, you tell us what the cost is and we'll

just add on 10 or 15%. What behavior does that incentivize? It incentivizes behaviors of making things are really, really expensive because you make more money. Aren't your direct kickbacks from the Treasury to the insurance companies to cover any, you know, whatever potential losses are starting to cover reduced? Yeah, they're subsidizing these companies and are these insurance companies. And so it's going, you're right, directly from the Treasury to the insurance companies. It doesn't even go through the individual. People would think libertarians are ideological or whatever, but and maybe we are,

but also it's just we thought this through that, look, if you hire Congress to construct how this is supposed to work, then some evil lobbyists you've never heard of who don't care about you at all are going to be the ones who write the law. Of course, you know,

I mean, really like the real libertarianism is that regulatory capture is why Alexander Hamilton created this government in the first place. It's right in the federalist papers. The rich people got to keep the government in business and the government's got to keep the rich people in business. And so, you know, call it, as Robert Higgs calls it, a participatory fascism where, you know,

it's not exactly Mussolini, but it's Woodrow Wilson, you know, it sucks, man. I don't know how anyone could think. Yeah, the solution or a problem is to get the democracy to have the Congress, you know, regulate how the economy should play out on these questions. All you're going to get is Obamacare at best, right? which is total screw job for everyone involved, except the suppliers. You know,

but just look at United Health Care. The insurance companies, all them gets to screw all of us, regular people over. Look at the stock price of United Healthcare since Obamacure was installed. You know, so it's been 15 years plus or minus.

It has been up until the right. They've had a little problem over the last, you know, six or nine months because they did some pretty bad stuff, but allegedly. But, you know, it's, I think United States, health care is up something like 10X, you know, over the last, you know, 15 years because of

Obamacare. They were, they were in the room. I mean, clearly they were in the room writing these, this legislation. Yeah. No question about that. Yeah, it was completely a corporate thing for me. All right, listen, I don't want to keep you too long, but I'm happy to have you on board. Me and my wallet are sorry that we didn't figure this out earlier that I could advertise

for you. And if I do a good enough job, cover my health care costs with that. So that would be great. We're honored to have you, brother. I mean, we got like, funny, just real quick, funny story is I went on like 70 podcast at the end of 2021 just to figure out like who is this going to resonate with. And it was overwhelming the number of libertarians who this resonates with. It just decentralized as much as is humanly possible.

And a part of that is because I'm libertarian. So decentralized as much as humanly possible, and that will give you the best possible outcome. And so that's ultimately what we're trying to do is not have this crowd health in the middle of everything. It's like, no, decentralize it to other human beings who are willing to help out and keep any kind of central authority out of the middle of this.

So we are going that direction for sure is taking us out as much as possible and let it to be a peer-to-peer transaction. And so far it's working great. So, and by the way, the libertarians, we know who they are, they, they sign up with promo codes like yours are way better customers than, you know, others. Let's just say that. You know, they're like not entitled and they like, they're like, yeah, man, like, this is fair. Like, it's fair that we don't have people with preexisting conditions joining the community and plopping them right on the community and then bailing out the next day. Like, that's just not fair, right? And so we're, we, we we use very much kind of libertarian, you know, economic principles and what we do. And we'd love to have more, you know, and, you know, join us. So thanks again for having me on and being willing to talk more about us on your show.

Yeah, absolutely. And so tell us lastly here about that promo code. Yeah. I mean, if you go to join crowdhealth.com, you can, you can come and join us. And the promo code is $99 a month for the first three months. is it Scott? Is that what your promo code is? I think it was Horton.

Horton. So use the promo code Horton. Scott's better though. Sounds better, right? Join crowdhelp.com slash Scott. If you don't have any other Scots in my way. Yeah, I can check to see if I have any Scots in your way. But yeah, come and join us on that.

We'll make, we'll make Scott and Horton both of them, you know, promo codes. There you can. So you can use whatever one you want. And you get $99 bucks for the first three months. So appreciate it. And looking forward to have more of your listeners join us. Absolutely. Well, thanks very much for your time.

Appreciate it. Thanks out. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokridge, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fools Air, Enough Already, and my latest, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia,

and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music, intro and outro videos by dissident media, audio mastering by Potsworth Media.

See you all next time.