TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #327: Healthcare on a Bitcoin Standard with Andy Schoonover

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Andy Schoonover, CEO of CrowdHealth, to discuss the problems with the health care system, how CrowdHealth is providing better product, and how bitcoin can fix the health insurance industry. Follow Andy on Twitter Learn more about CrowdHealth Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl

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Enjoy this riff. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central

bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. We've got to burn down the healthcare

industry burn it down hopefully the atf doesn't call me when i say that i gotta burn down the healthcare industry i'm like the knock on your door right well the atf is known for burning things down maybe we should that's true maybe we should tap them not too far from here too maybe they'll help us exactly maybe you can help uh help sitting down with uh andy shunova from CrowdHealth. Thank you for coming on, Sam. Man, thanks for having me. This is fun. Appreciate it. Well, like I was saying right before we recorded, I think what you're doing is

very important. You're here to burn down the healthcare industry and build it back up. So before we get into CrowdHealth and all that, why do you think it needs to be burnt down? There's just so many legacy

incentives that it's just going to be hard to whittle away. Yeah. You know, it needs to be burned down or broken and started again because there are too many people with too much money involved to see it make significant progress by just a slow whittle. You know, it really needs to be burnt down and started again. I think it has to start with the payment processes, given there are so many perverse incentives within payment. We can get into that. But it's people are like, why is health care so broken? You know, and I was like, well, when you have a system where the buyers of health care, which is health plans, and the sellers of health care, which are hospital systems, and they both want the price to go up, guess what? The price is going up, right? It doesn't take, you know, an economist to figure that out. So we've got an incentive system where health plans actually want prices to go up.

It's really screwed up. And they're the ones supposed to be negotiating for us, right? But they're not. I mean, they've got an incentive to actually see your premiums go up from month to month. And so it's just unsustainable. So you have hospitals, the plan providers. So let's describe all the stakeholders in this incentive system. So those are two.

Who else is layered in there? Well, you got brokers, right? So brokers are in the game because it's so complex that nobody feels like they can tackle health insurance on their own. And so the brokers take a big chunk out of your, your monthly premium as well. You know, it's somewhere between 10 and 15% goes to brokers, which is incredible to me. And so, you know, they're in the middle of that. So if you could redo the system, so it's less complex, you and I would feel very comfortable with going on, you know, the internet and order, order health insurance, just like we would kayak on, you know, airplanes or cars or, you know, things like that. all the other things that we go on the online to buy it shouldn't be complex and so you know crowd health we're really trying to simplify everything simplicity is a core value of ours we just want to make it easy to understand um given health care is just so so damn complex well it's not only complex it's stressful i mean thinking about it i was telling you

i left my former employer when i was getting health benefits from uh and basically quit that job and have since had to transition to Cobra and my wife is pregnant. And it turns out that being pregnant in the state of Texas is a preexisting condition. So, uh, our Cobra costs per month are pretty insane more than our rent was, uh, on the Upper East side, uh, in New York when I first moved to New York and it's stressful. It's like, damn, why am I paying this much? And then you have like deductibles, like you're, you're going and then you're paying money anyway. And it's very confusing. I'm like, wait, what am I paying for insurance for?

Like, I'm still paying all this money. Co-pays, out-of-pocket maximums, co-insurance. You're like, you have no idea how much this pregnancy is going to cost you probably. No. Like, you're just like, you have to just take it. Right. Like, okay, well, I guess that's what it is. It's like the only service in the country I can think of.

It's like you go and you get a service and you have no clue what it's going to cost you. It's like a plumber coming into your house and like handing you a $2,000 bill for fixing the faucet. You're like, wait, hold on a second. Like, how can this be legitimate? You know? And so that's just has to change. And again, simplify things really, really easy. You know, with crowd health, it's like 500 bucks. That's what you're going to pay. You know, if you break your arm, 500 bucks. If you get, you know, have your baby, 500 bucks. If you have cancer, 500 bucks right walk into the hospital 500 bucks super simple um and i think that's kind of the key to why we've been successful over you know the last year or so is people understand it when they come

in like i don't have any questions about how much it's going to cost me which is a key component well why did you start crowd health because i've uh been talking to jonathan from 10 30 when he's very passionate about what you're doing him being a doctor himself and he said you got pulled out retirement to do this i basically yeah got pulled out of retirement i i was doing another healthcare technology company and i sold it to a private equity firm and it went you know super super good um and so i was kind of retired there for a while and then i was as such i i didn't have healthcare from an employer most of us get healthcare from employers like you mentioned so i went over to healthcare.gov and i was kind of ignorant i should have never done it but i did i went to healthcare.gov

and chose a plan that kind of looked right like there's literally a hundred different options you know with different co-pays and deductibles and all these kinds of things and premiums and i'm like man i don't know like this one looks right um so i got one and uh my little one who was uh one at the time was having a recurring ear infection so we went to the ear nose and throat doc and said you need to get tubes in the ears um so we went to the local hospital and got tubes in her ears 15 minute procedure got the bill eight grand i was like eight grand for 15 minutes like this is ridiculous we were actually in the hospital for 45 minutes total like in and out it was like the fastest hospital trip i've ever been into and uh so i was like

all right well i have insurance like that's the whole point of insurance and they sent me a note snail mail interestingly and said uh it was medically unnecessary and so we're not going to pay for it um so you know one that your nose and throat doc delayed his vacation by day because he was so worried about her long-term hearing loss to once we got the tubes in her ears, her recurring ear infection stopped. So, and they still come back and says it's medically unnecessary. So, uh, I had to stroke an $8,000 check to the local hospital and I was pissed. So the hospitals defining that as a necessary, no, no, the health insurance insurance. Okay. Yeah. So the health insurance plan says we're not paying for it. It's between you and the hospital.

And so I didn't know better. I just was like, okay, well, I don't want to go into collections. I don't want to, you know, have my credit score impacted. I guess I'll just have to pay for it again. Like we just kind of have to bend over and take it, right? Like that's how health insurance is structured right now. So I had to write the $8,000 check. And the sucky thing about this is, right? Like I can do that.

I've been, you know, super fortunate, but I don't know, 75, 80%, maybe more of Americans, they don't have eight grand sitting in the bank to do this, right? And this is for ear tubes. This is like a totally like benign, common thing. And that is putting people into bankruptcy. So 250,000 people last year went bankrupt, even though they had health insurance because of medical bills.

You're like, what the hell? Like the whole point of health insurance is so that like, it's there when you need it, right? So, I mean, it's just so broken in so many ways. I mean, we spend twice as much as the next country per capita on health care. I mean, it's screwed up. And it's not because of consumption. It's not like we're consuming way more health care.

It's because of prices. Yeah. And like you said, the insurance companies are supposed to negotiate on your behalf, right? And they're like, no, we're going to... So how much money are these insurance companies making? Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. The seventh and eighth largest company on the planet is Aetna and UnitedHealthcare. On the planet.

This is not the United States. By revenue, they have more revenue than every other company in the planet except five or six. And having interacted with UnitedHealthcare specifically, they're not reinvesting in tech or anything like that. You go to their site and you try to... I think that's what we get, UnitedHealth via Cobra. Yeah. And like going to their site and like, yeah, trying to like just manage your healthcare account. It's very confusing.

Well, the, you know, Obamacare, I guess it's about 10 years old or now or so, had a piece in there that said the health plans can only profit 15% of your premium. So on the outside looking in, you're like, oh, great. You know, the health plans can't fleece us, right? The problem with that is that. Jack up the premium. They jack up the premiums, so they make more. So, like, if you have a $1,000 premium, the most they can make is $150. Guess what?

At an $1,100 premium, they can make $165. So, they're a for-profit, right? So, of course, their incentive is to have premiums increase, which is totally screwed up. Government trying to create price ceilings. I think the intention was good, I guess, right? But the ramifications of that are bad. I mean, right. I'm a healthcare guy. You're a Bitcoin guy. We both believe that when government gets involved in things, 99 times out of 100, they screw it up. The intent, arguably, let's just argue for the sake of it, is good. But they just don't understand the basic economics of how the market works. So you take all the free market aspects out of healthcare and you get rising prices. It's just going to happen. Well, you compound that negative externality of the government messing things up when it meddles with, I actually wrote about this on Friday, with the fiat monetary system, the fact that they can just print money and misallocate it terribly at all these things that they want to put their hands in just compounds the problem to a very high degree.

healthcare being one of the best examples, education being another, where, yeah, we're going to give everybody free education. We're going to give out all these loans. And then the universities just jack their price up where some universities are charging like 80 grand a year now. And it's a coupling of government meddling and a unsound monetary system that enables it.

The ability to print X new loan, just throw it at all this stuff. And that's why I think the convergence of Bitcoin in any of these areas that government is meddling in is a very powerful tool to sort of fix things. Like you said, the incentives in the healthcare system are all messed up. And imagine what we can do if we can get the government out of it and combine it with Bitcoin, which is something you plan on doing with CrowdHealth too. Yeah, we're a couple months away. So I think August 1st is going to be launch date. We've kind of talked about that in the team internally, and we're going to launch our Bitcoin version of what we're doing in just a couple months.

So we're right around the corner. All right, so let's dive into how CrowdHealth works now and how it will work when Bitcoin's incorporated. Sure. Did you find Bitcoin because you noticed it would provide this utility to CrowdHealth, or you've been a Bitcoiner and been thinking of ways to integrate it? Yeah, I've been a Bitcoiner for not that long. I'm pretty new. I kind of joked that Bitcoin is my second language, you know, healthcare is my primary language. Um, so I'm, I'm learning, um, and it's been a fun. And I, I mean, I feel like the community within Bitcoin has just been like, so embracing of anybody who's willing to sit here

and be like, dude, I don't know everything, but I'm learning and I'm, you know, intrigued and they're like, oh yeah, come on in, you know, like let's teach you. So, um, you know, I'm friends with jimmy here saw jimmy song here in austin um and he kind of orange pilled me about a year ago and so started a year year ago and have been investing you know over the last year um and so fairly new to bitcoin but my um first kind of love is is health care so when i had this thing happen with my my daughter i was like man we gotta do something different here you know and and so i've been uninsured for two and a half years and so my my wife and i have kind of started building some tools that allow us to operate outside the health insurance system. And the culmination of

that is crowd health. And so we had a seed round last year of 6 million bucks. We're going to raise another 10 to 15 here over the next couple of months. And so we're excited to get, see that going. But basically what this is, is it's almost like an HSA, right? Instead of putting your money into a health insurance company who holds this money in a big pot of fiat, right? Depreciating assets um you know what if you could do that in in bitcoin you know like basically have a pot of bitcoin instead of a pot of of uh of fiat right um so again the mechanics is you put money into an account every month um 25 of that is held in fiat um 75 is converted to bitcoin you hold that in we're trying to do self-custody in a self-custody way you're only going to touch

that in case there's something big that happens that you need to pay for. The 25% in fiat is for just liquidity. We don't want you to sell your Bitcoin. So we just can have a little bit of fiat there for liquidity. And then if somebody in the community has a health event, like my family's daughter breaks her arm, right? It's six grand. Like I said earlier, I'm responsible for the 500 or committed to the 500. And then the, the 5,500 is, uh, I asked 55 people in the community. We throw in a hundred bucks to help me with my health event. Um, and then you can say yes or no, it's up to you. It's more like crowdfunding. Um, and if you say yes, then money is transferred from your account, a hundred bucks from your account into my account. And then once I get

55 people to say, yes, I've got all the money I need in my account to pay for that, that health event. Um, and so that's how that works. And are these accounts held on, uh, the platform or in just your personal bank account? They're held on there. They are a, we start, we start a bank account in your name, FDIC insured at a bank. And so that money is held. A fiat is held in a bank account that is under your name. So, and the great thing is, is if you decide to leave crowd health, it's your money, you take it with you. So, you know, it's not like your health insurance plan you're putting money in and it disappears into the black hole of health and plan land it's it's yours you know we're just setting up an account for you so that we know that you're actually

putting money into an account and not you know spending it on whatever um so that's that's the reason that we do that so and we've done this for a couple hundred bills so far and it's ranged from a $47 pediatrician bill to a 175 or a hundred and whatever, several hundred thousand dollar brain aneurysm. So small bill, big bill, it's worked a couple hundred times thus far and it works great. So. So how does it work? Do you have like different communities? Is it one large community? Like how many people are in each? Yeah. So our Bitcoin community is going to be our second community okay um and i need about a thousand people to get it up and going one because infrastructure just chain charges uh expenses and the two is like hey if just you and i in a

in a community you know and i get cancer or something um we'd be like okay all right how are we going to get this cancer before right so i need a thousand people to kind of viably do this And so we have several hundred have signed up with us thus far on the Bitcoin side. So I need to get to a thousand before I launch. I'll be ready to launch our August 1st. And so anybody who hears us, who's interested, would love you to jump on over to our website and sign up. Well, I know you got one here.

Crowdhealthbtc.com. And it's just, it shows you how it works at the bottom. It's like, give me your email and the number of people in your house. who are interested and uh once we launch we're gonna send out an email to everybody and say hey we're ready to roll let's do it and you can then sign up online so there's no commitment right now just kind of looking for interest okay i'm interested so you got four for my there you go and this is available nationally yeah all over yeah nationally in puerto rico so you got to have a uh a u.s based uh address yeah so and so you've been operating for a couple years like how

housing you said you've paid hundreds of bills yeah what uh what's the date like so i'm interested to see we started in april of last year so we're a little over a year old over yeah and so and we've used i saw this morning the stat 24 of the money that you've put in we've used for health events which means that 76 of what you put in is still left in your account and like yeah what's the breakdown of like people who are contributing versus people who get sick and like need to pay bills? Like do you have, that's the other thing too,

like do you have, are you looking for people who are like healthier to decrease risk for the overall group? Yeah, you know, it's interesting, right? Like we didn't set out

to do that, but it is self-selecting, right? We're doing something new. We're doing something different. It's tech enabled. And therefore, the people who are self-selecting in

are younger. Our average age is 34. So young crew. Um, the average, uh, BMI is like four or five points lower than the national average. So they tend to be, you know, healthier. Um, you know, you can't be over 300 pounds and join us, you know, so, you know, that's the one stipulation. If you have a preexisting condition, um, you know, all we do is we ask that you pay for

your preexisting condition for that first year, and then we'll fund up to 25,000 of that pre-existing in the second 50 and the third and a hundred the fourth and beyond so it's kind of like look if you have a pre-existing condition you can't just jump on and then expect everybody else to pay for your stuff right so um again it's kind of a maybe more of a libertarian leaning you know view on on this but um no i think these bitcoin i was just at bitcoin 22 i'm sure you were too and down in miami um it's like look everybody there is young you know everybody there is feels more fit than the average, takes more personal responsibility in their health. And so we're setting up a crowd of just folks that do Bitcoiners, Bitcoiners only. You're going to be funding other

Bitcoiners only. And so I think it's going to be a really healthy crowd is my guess, probably more healthy and a little bit younger than my existing crowd. Yeah. And what do you think the biggest mental hurdle is for people to go from like traditional health insurance to something like crowd health yeah we just got it you know stuck in our mind we've been conditioned to think you got to have health insurance you know and i feel like that's why i'm so excited about presenting this the bitcoin community because we have already gotten over the hurdle like this is the way that you have to do it right you have to pay with these dollar bills in my pocket right like no no you don't have to do that like that's not the only way there is another way and so i think it's our

biggest objection is typically from people who are risk averse and are like, I'm just not going to do something new. And I was like, man, I think ours is way less risky than going with an insurance plan, right? Like I got rejected on an $8,000, you know, tubes in my daughter's ears when the ENT told me, ear, nose and throat doc told me that it had to happen. And in fact, if you go to healthcare.gov, one out of every six claims last year was rejected, was denied. So you have a one out of six chance of getting your your bill denied and we've paid thus far 100 of the bills that have come in we've gotten unpaid right so i was like i think going to united is more risky than coming to us but and you know me and my family are on it all of our people are on it so

we we believe in it and uh so i don't you know if you're in tennessee it's one out of every three if you're with healthcare.gov if you live in texas where we are now it's one out of every five those are real like legitimate you know probabilities yeah like you said i mean eight thousand dollars you mentioned a stat earlier but the stat that always sticks in my mind is something like 60 of americans couldn't afford a 400 emergency expense without going into debt and now 50 to 60 of americans have medical debt on their credit card yeah right like that's a problem like that's riskier to me so here's the crazy thing right is the government tells the insurance plans that they can market that they promise to pay and it's a guarantee that's

a part of insurance they will guarantee that they'll pay your health insurance yet they don't the government says to me you can't guarantee and if you do guarantee your health insurance you're considered health insurance and therefore you've got you know thousands of pages of regulations that you have to live by yet i'm actually getting the bills paid right so it's one of those really screwed up situations um but hey i mean it seems like you're actually providing better insurance than the actual insurance industry yeah well it's assurance you know instead of insurance you know we're not insurance that's one of the things i want to let you know folks know we're not insurance we're not guaranteeing that your bill is paid we can't do

that you know or regulators will send me cease and desist we were just talking about it earlier um uh you know and so we're not insurance we are a different way of doing that just like bitcoin is not dollar bills right like it is not yes there are there are some similarities for sure but they are not dollars this is not health insurance what's another way to pay for your health care and we we had uh we talked was it two weeks ago now at this point and we were talking about the libertarian hospital in oklahoma that has proven at the hospital level that you can do health care a different way and this is just like another way to do that it's like they actually are upfront about the cost of their procedures and allow people to pay in cash. I think I told you

the story a couple of weeks ago and I'll tell it again, but we had a member in Wisconsin had to have a heart surgery. The local hospital in Wisconsin, which is like owned by one health systems, like, so they have a monopoly up there. It was $83,000 for their surgery there. We found them one in Chicago, which is about an hour and a half away for $44,000. We found them one in Oklahoma city that was $22,000. So it's like a thousand miles away and it's $60,000 difference. So we stuck them on, you know, first class to first class trip, uh, flights to, uh, or plane tickets down to Oklahoma city, Milwaukee, Oklahoma city, put them up in the nicest hotel in Oklahoma city in the suite uh for three days and we're still saving 55 grand and we paid them you know

2,500 bucks to go down there and do it right how does that work we like as a part of the health event you know we we we went and we crowdfunded their surgery their flights their hotel and 2,500 hundred bucks. And it was still more than 50 grand, 55 grand less than what their local hospital was. Right. So we can do crazy things like that because, and by the way, this, this heart surgeon in Oklahoma city was like a center of excellence. Like he's done more of these things than almost anybody in the country. And so who would you want to go to the person in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who never does these or the guy in Oklahoma city who will do this for 25% of what that guy will do them and he does them all the time right so that's just like united health care would never do that

you know etna would never do that but we can do that well this gets back to the concept of like negotiating on behalf of the people who are a part of crowd health or part of like an insurance plan you're actually going out negotiating looking for the best deals for these procedures and healthcare around the country what's what's that like that process like yeah we have one here in austin uh a woman tore her acl playing pickleball of all things pickleball is like blowing up right now i know it's crazy um you know in the health plan pricing is like 20 grand for an acl replacement in uh in austin and so we got it for 13 um with again one of the best orthopedic surgeons in town. And the reason why he'll do that is we're going to pay him

in cash, right? The day of, right? So we do all the crowdfunding beforehand. She has the money ready to go on the day of her surgery. She pays him on the day of the surgery. And so the doc is like, wow, I get paid cash. You know, otherwise he'd have to wait 60 or 90 days for health insurance plan to pay him. They would haggle with him. He's not sure exactly how much they're going to pay him you know so we take out all of those risks we pay him on the day in cash and he's like dude this is great like can you bring me more people i'm willing to give you serious discounts if you'll pay me in cash um doctors about 30 of their time is spent with health insurance plans and so if we can give them 30 of their time back they're willing to take significant discounts because

one they they just want to take care of their patients like that's why they got into medicine and not haggling with the health insurance companies. So, yeah, the doctors love it almost as much as the members love it. Yeah, you hear a bunch of horror stories about how a lot of doctors' work is a bunch of administrative bullshit. Yeah, totally.

That they don't want to deal with at all. Yeah, it's very sad as a society. We've gotten to a point where we've made healthcare hard for people at a time when society's supposed to be advancing technologically, intellectually, and we're supposed to be moving forward. It seems like in some areas, again,

where the government tends to meddle and things become materially worse off. I mean, you just talk broadly about healthcare, not even like the services, just like health of your average American. It's a woeful state. Well, it's a $4 trillion industry in this country, which is probably one of the biggest industries on the planet.

Like $4 trillion is bigger than all GDPs of any country except us, China and Japan, you know, it's like, it's huge. And so there's just lots of money to be made, right? So you've got the brokers, you've got, you know, everybody's in the middle of it. And once a little piece, one of the other thing that's crazy, um, it's interesting to me may not be to your audience, but you know, when these doctors bill health insurance plans, they have to bill through an electronic health record and the electronic health record takes between six and 10% of the revenue for just billing, right? Your Visa or your MasterCard or whatever

takes two, two, two, five, something like that percent. You know, with Bitcoin is becoming almost frictionless. And so, you know, just to think that the electronic health record takes that right off the top, which, you know, the doctor doesn't get, right? It's all these people just biting away at the total cost here.

And it just, we get rid of all that. well then you get into the whole incentive of like is the industry actually incentivized to make people healthier yeah well absolutely not which is a really fucked up when you're thinking about i mean fda putting out the food pyramid which made us all fat and i mean not the pyramid itself but normalizing the consumption of shit um which increases health care costs the opioid epidemic is another thing that you point to and like these people really don't care about health are pushing pills on people because it's very lucrative.

I mean, I don't want to get kicked off YouTube, but there was, in the last couple years, people favored newer treatments over older generic ones because generic ones weren't very profitable.

Again, do you think there is a nefarious incentive system where people in the industry are literally not incentivized to make sure that the end patient is healthy at all? Sure.

There's no doubt about it. there's no doubt in my mind there's a nefarious and look and and so we can point fingers at people at health insurance and i don't particularly you know love the folks that are running these health insurance companies but they are they are responding to um how do i make as much money as possible right um they're working within the framework the government has given them which has allowed them to make a ton of money you know on us and it has allowed them to be able to to deny some of these claims um and not and get away with it right so is that nefarious or is that just you know playing the game you know hate the hate the play i hate the game well you know what is it

right um and so the game is just so screwed up that they're just playing the game yeah i mean with opioid specifically i forget what documentary it was where they went in they uh the whole concept of like healing pain or something like that it was was the i mean i think they literally had to get something changed or approved by a regular say no we can treat pain um over like a specific disease and that opened the floodgates that was totally screwed up i mean the whole opioid thing was totally screwed up yeah i mean when you have you know one pain doctor in bum kentucky or whatever it was uh you know with a ten thousand percent more opioids than than the guy in you know downtown you know manhattan or whatever it's like something's screwed up here so

there's some nefarious things going on there for sure yeah yeah so how crowd health changes the incentives does bitcoin change the incentives at all in your mind well i think it does i mean look for one other the quick thing in crowd health is the way we make money is just a subscription so you're paying us 25 bucks a month to be on the platform it's a platform fee that's our primary way of making money so we actually are incentivized with with everybody else to grow the community right and the more people you have in the community the better you are better off everybody is so totally aligned incentives um well that was one of my questions i wanted to ask like is this scalable yeah yeah it is and then with the other revenue source that

we have is say um you know the what the health plan pays versus what we negotiate we take some of the difference so it actually incentivizes us to reduce cost as much as as possible right so again totally aligned with with uh with the membership base so you know i think we're very aligned no perverse incentives there um and we're very transparent on how we we do that so you can go on our website right now even if you're not a member and you'd be like oh this is how they make their money that's how it should be um and then i think for look i think for bitcoin you know right now we have this inefficiency right where we have these big pools of capital that are depreciating right and so you have to overcome that to overcome that your premiums go up and i was like if we can

get a a decentralized pool of of capital in bitcoin where the asset is actually going up like you know people roll my roll their eyes when i say this but i was like man i think there's an opportunity with bitcoin that you know folks like you and i who are willing to do this may never have to pay healthcare again, right? Like, I mean, if Bitcoin does what we think it's going to do, and that's why we're all, you know, in this, I think there's that opportunity

that your, you know, few hundred bucks a month over time builds up to, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of, you know, assets sitting there that you can use for healthcare or you can hold on to, right? But I think there is a scenario in which you don't have to pay for healthcare again, right? Because you've got this asset that now is really, really valuable.

Yeah, the way I describe it to my wife, because again, she's one of those who's like, oh, I don't know if we can go off regular insurance. It's like, honey, we're going to speculative attack our future healthcare costs. That's right. That's right. It's the way I view it, at least.

Yeah. When we join CrowdHealth. Yeah, it makes so much sense. If Bitcoin does what it continues to do or has done, which I think it will because I think the incentives of Bitcoin

and its adoption are very apparent this is a no-brainer and then on the doctor side too maybe you start getting them some skin in the game

on the Bitcoin and then they're incentivized to start stacking and over time they're able to lower their costs or their prices

at the end of the day they could this crazy effect on the overall pricing across the healthcare industry not only on the um the assurance side but on the actual delivery of the product at the end of the day well i think you know most people within bitcoin want it more widely adopted more people to be you know on the on the bandwagon and i think that if the doctors can get on the bandwagon in a four trillion dollar industry it can be a really a mover i mean it could be a mover in in bitcoin you get four trillion dollars pouring into you

know or even a small fraction of four trillion pouring into to bitcoin that is going to move the price up yes right um it just is so you need you need more and we're going to ask every doctor is like look do you want to be paid in bitcoin or do you want to get paid in you know fiat like it's up to you like that's going to be something that's just a part of our normal course and a lot of doctors be like what the what are you talking about you know but it's good to have the conversation then it's like okay here's why you should take it here's a touch but it's a touch it's a touch point and they need multiple touch points yeah and doctors are the most respected profession in the country it's doctors and nurses and so you get a bunch of well-respected folks

who've got some capital right most of these doctors make decent money um getting on the bitcoin bandwagon i think there's a movement that can start there if it starts within health care then like watch out um yeah so sort of everywhere health care energy the ranching industry let's get all these yeah very important sectors bought in that's that's what's making me very bullish about bitcoin the united states specifically obviously you have a lot of people lobbying politicians and we had the bitcoin mining council send something to the epa this week but i think if you just look around at the natural grassroots growth between individuals particular industries if you can kickstart the healthcare industry it's going to get to a point within the next few years where it's

it's undeniable that it is beneficial and that if the government were to try to take it away from all these integral sectors there would be backlash that would that would be very palpable for for those that are those elected officials yeah well and impact their ability to get re-elected yeah look get on the bandwagon or else what is it 40 million people or something like that that are in bitcoin or maybe more crypto or whatever the number is but it's like it's a big enough population that you you gotta think they start having some sway yeah i think it's happening i think it's happening yeah agreed and then back to crowd health yeah and the doctor's incentives too this is um some of the question that hops on my mind as we've been talking here like

So could you argue, even though the doctors within CrowdHealth are selling their services for lower cost because you're negotiating them because you're able to pay them right away and all that, could you argue they can actually make more money in the long run by engaging in this model because it would bring more people to actually go get healthcare? because you can make the argument that a lot of people actually don't get things looked at or go to the doctors because they're worried about like the cost of insurance or a procedure. Yeah, I think there's no doubt. I mean, I think it's at a minimum break-even, you know, and if it's break-even and your emotional well-being is much, much higher, then it's a win, right? So just, you know, for your audience,

one of the crazy things about this is that the doctors oftentimes have to call the health insurance plans to say, hey, can I do this procedure? And they're talking to somebody at the health insurance plan. It's called a pre-authorization that is not a doctor. So can you imagine like a doctor calling a non-doctor at some, you know, actuarial goofball sitting in the bowels of a health insurance plan that says, can I do X, Y, and Z pharmaceutical or, you know, knee replacement or whatever? and that person says, no, you can't, right? So, and by the way, in that claims,

one out of six claims on healthcare.gov, that's just the claims that are actually submitted to the health insurance plan. It does not include all the pre-authorizations that get rejected by the health insurance plan. So your health insurance plan is actually the one who is dictating what care can be provided, right? And so you think about it,

just the doctors being like, this is BS, man. Like the health insurance plan should not be able to tell me what I need to do for my patient. I'm the doctor. I'm the one that spent, whatever, a dozen years in residencies and medical school and all this kind of stuff. And so they hate that shit. They hate it.

And so we can take that away from the requirement. And just like, look, doctors, we trust you. We trust you to make the best decision. And yeah, some doctors are going to be stupid about it. And yeah, for sure. But we are spending way more money trying to keep them from fraudulent behavior than the actual fraudulent behavior that's going to happen, right? So they love this.

it's they absolutely can make more money and they can have emotional well-being that is well beyond and by the way more people more doctors in the last year have quit than in any other time in history because of one the pandemic two health insurance plans and government intervention right and so like we need something for the doctors to get reinvigorated by you know practicing medicine we think we can be you know one of those those pieces yeah it's scary thought have doctors quitting just because they're tired of the bureaucrat bureaucratic bullshit the better business bureau bullshit as they say supply demand goes wacky right well you're seeing right now in airline industry too all the pilots are like you know what screw this mandates um in many areas

they're just like all right we're retiring you have like a shortfall of something like 60,000 pilots right now in the united states which is insane right and i all i think a lot of this is because of of the government intervention back to government intervention right this whole mask thing we won't get there but you know i'm saying like all these crazy things that have happened over the last couple of years have put a lot of the industries that we rely upon including health care on tilt right because they just can't they're tired of it well that's it i mean i've had a very direct experience with the insanity the mask mandate specifically

my son, I was talking about him before he's two, he just turned two earlier this year and because of the mandate hasn't obviously been able he wasn't in the first two years of his life even though we had him hanging out with his cousins and stuff because of the mask mandate

he was a couple months behind on speech development and so we engaged with a speech pathologist to help catch him up and she's been doing an incredible job but when she first showed up she was wearing a mask and my wife asked her she's like are you going to be wearing the mask when you do the speech pathology and she was like yeah we have to due to like policy um luckily we were able to convince her like hey we're not going to snitch on you and she's been doing it without it but like they're literally sending speech pathologists to

teach kids how to speak which an integral part of that is looking at looking at lips right and seeing this how crazy is this stuff it's insane i mean it's literal clown world it is clown It's almost like they're trying to see how stupid we are and how much people will take to, it's like a touring test or something like that. It's like, yeah. It's insane. Like I'm getting angry right now just thinking about it.

Like you should show a little bit of the mask. You're like, you're going to do speech lessons with my son with a mask on? This doesn't make any sense. They were like, oh, I can bring a clear mask. It gets a little foggy, but like it's better than this. And I want to be clear. the woman is is working with my son is incredible we love her um and luckily she's we've worked out

this deal in private where it's like you don't have to wear the mask we're not gonna snitch on you that's great but that's great um to think there's families out there that haven't been able to convince their speech pathologist to do this is insane it's insane i mean yeah multiply that by 10 with just health care some of the insanity that i can tell you about you know it's it's it's again the perverse incentives are insane absolutely insane that's good let's get in some more so i guess let's completely destroy the health care industry what are other insane well you know the other things too is like um we live in austin you know there there are two hospital systems in austin arc and well no it's it's saint david's and

Ascension, right? Ascension Seton are the two biggies, right? And so they own Austin. You cannot provide health insurance in Austin unless you have both of those lined up, right? And so there have been duopoly. There are duopoly in Austin. So even if a UnitedHealthcare wanted to negotiate with Ascension or St. David's, they can't because they can't lose one of them. So it's one of the biggest companies on the planet who can't actually negotiate with the hospital system because they're negotiating against a duopoly. But you and I can go in and we have more negotiating power than UnitedHealthcare does in that situation. So imagine this, right? You know, cancer or whatever it is, it's a million dollar bill. The health system will look at you and be

like, okay, you know, how are you going to pay a million dollar bill? You probably can't. So let's negotiate. So UnitedHealthcare will pay a million if we were their patient. The Schoonovers will probably pay more like $250,000 and they'll do it $10,000 a month for 24 months. So 0% interest or actually negative interest due to inflation that the Schoonovers will have to pay for that. And so if you think about it within the crowd health example, let's just say we've got a couple thousand people, that's five bucks per person per month for a couple of years for a catastrophic claim. So instead of paying the million dollars, we're paying 250, we're paying a 10 grand a month over two years. And so it just, you know, minimizes that huge, you know, bill. And we're able to do

that because actual market forces are working, right? I can actually negotiate with, with the hospital. There's actually federal code that says if somebody provides you with a service and they haven't given you the price beforehand uh you they have to negotiate a fair price that is federal code law law so you can go into the emergency room they're not going to give you a you know a fair price when you come out you can negotiate with them and that's what we do on behalf of our members so we're getting like 60 negotiations on on average the bigger bills you get 80 or 90 percent so that's one of the crazy things like we as individuals have more negotiating power than than united healthcare does you know one one like real like tactical thing your audience can do

whether you join crowd health or not you know you uh you walk into your doctor you walk into the hospital and they give you these still like we're we're in freaking 2022 and they're giving you these clipboards of like five or six sheets of paper that you fill out the same questions every time right you're like guys haven't you figured out how to do this yet but anyway one of them is the personal financial responsibility form which it basically says when you sign it says you agree to pay whatever we charge you right and you sign it and most of us just like fly through it like we just don't even pay attention we just and what we tell our members to do is is is mark through that sentence and put, I agree to pay appropriate charges or reasonable charges, either one of those

works. And that allows you after the fact to go in and negotiate with them because you didn't sign your life away. So every time you go into the doctor's office, they'll give you that sheet of paper, cross through it. And not once have we had any doctor come back and say, oh yeah, we can't do this. They'll always do it. And it gives you now the prime negotiating leverage on that doctor or that hospital. I would imagine 99% of people don't even know this is a thing. Don't even know it. Don't even know it. I didn't know it. I was in healthcare before. I didn't know it. And so I started doing research and I was like, how can these hospitals do this? Oh, well, you signed your life away when you went in. Oh, and by the way, you had a concussion or you had

you know a broken hand or your blood was gushing and they're like oh yeah by the way sign this right and you're like yeah just get get me get me in the room get me in the room and then you walk into the emergency room and you're on insurance right and the anesthesiologist is out of network because all the anesthesiologists in the hospital all the er doctors in the hospital aren't actually employed by the hospital they're separate companies that may or may not be in the same network as the hospital so right when you're it's crazy right so you when you talk about your deductible it's like hey a family of four will probably have a ductable somewhere between four and eight thousand dollars that's in network if you go to the hospital and they have a out of

network er then you're paying that doesn't count towards your deductible i mean that is screwed up right like and you don't even have anything to say you could be unconscious going into the er you have no idea if the doctor working on you is in network or out of network and the impact on you is thousands could be tens of thousands of dollars and then that example you just put for you're forced into that you're forced into it you have no way of getting out of it i think it's complex and it feels like there should just be a streamline like if you own a hospital chevy art doctors anesthesiologists yeah is that just not scalable like why has it gotten to this piecemealed it almost like the hospital is becoming real estate companies

right like they want to they want to uh own the real estate and they have people you know pay in to be a part of the the services and then they get the the funds from that little piece and so you got these hospitals that could be 30 or 40 or 50 different companies all providing care within that building and they're all on different networks and all kinds of crazy stuff but you can't tell the ambulance take me to saint david's as opposed to you know ascension maine right um just not the way it's just not the way it works no and then they'll take you to where they they want to take you and they're going to cover their ass right so they're going to take you to the the best ER, best quote unquote ER that they can take you to, to make sure they can take care of your

issue. Right. So there's, they're going to take you to the trauma center. If there's any like your shot. Yeah. Or, or even if there's something even close to trauma, because if they don't take you to a trauma center and they take you to like a tier two hospital and you actually had trauma, then now you have liability for taking them to the wrong place. Right. So they're always going to upcharge you to cover their ass well that's another thing just like ambulance cost in and of itself yeah a lot of people don't call 9-1-1 because they're like i'm not taking that this would be like four grand yeah we had a woman who was on one of these uh short-term health plans it was called uh golden rule and it was done by united so she fell in her in her bathroom hit her

head, called 911. The ambulance took her 15 miles. It was $3,500 for the ambulance. She was in the hospital for five hours, $35,000 for the hospital bill. And United decided to pay $1,500 and stuck her with the rest. What? Stuck her with the rest. So she got stuck with a $37,000 bill? It was like 33 or something like that. Yeah. I mean, it was stupid. So 35,000 was including ambulance. So the hospital bill was like 31 or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Stuck with the rest. And so she came to us. She's like, oh my gosh, CrowdHealth, can you help? Because one, I want to be a part of you because this short-term health parent screwed me. And two, can you help me negotiate? So we negotiated that down from 35,000. We got everything down except the ambulance.

she's only paying $1,500 out of pocket so the $32,000 went down to $1,500 the ambulance is still $3,500 and we're suing them in small claims court

on her behalf what's the what's the Kate's revolver on how you're able to sue them yeah for you know this

back to this they have to negotiate with us because you know it's code and United Healthcare paid them $500 and so they

she wants another they want another 3,500 from this woman. And so he's like, look, we didn't have an agreement with you, right? So you have to negotiate and you're not willing to negotiate a fair price. What is a fair price for 15 miles? And by the way, they couldn't get an IV in her. They didn't provide her any of those services and they charged her for all of those services, even though they didn't provide them. So we're suing them in small claims court. And that's the one thing we'll do. We'll provide you legal assistance in the case that the hospital just doesn't want to negotiate right which is not

something you would do on your own but we'll do it yeah how long do these negotiations take usually if a doctor or an ambulance provider a couple months yeah yeah typical months the the 32,000 the it's around 30 32 something like that thousand to 1500 took a couple weeks yeah the the ambulance one now has been going on for several months because they just won't negotiate yeah i think these people would want to help people you think you think yeah yeah let's just go into like dental and um doing dental and vision we're starting it in october okay so in the same thing but you know right now the dental and vision plans they totally suck like dental plan is basically you're paying for your cleanings yeah right and if you don't do your cleanings you basically lose out right

vision pays for your glasses which is a couple hundred bucks you're paying for a set of glasses or set of contacts or something we want to do it differently like look in your car you have auto insurance you pay for your gas you pay for your tires you pay for your oil change right like if you want to go in our dental or vision plan like you can pay for the oil change right but if something big happens that's when you really need something right so you know uh wisdom teeth or something like that for your or you know need crowns or implants or tmj or one of those things that cost several thousand dollars to fix like that's when you really need something you don't need it for your 200 hour cleaning no right so ours is going to be structured a little bit different

than your typical dental insurance, but I think it's going to be way better than the dental insurance you get from Humana or whatever. Yeah. I mean, that's something. I've foregone dentist visits in the past. I'm like, I don't feel like fucking paying for this. Yeah.

The other thing we're going to do too is virtual primary care. So instead of having to go to your doctor's office, which sucks, you plan it, you got a half an hour to get there, you sit in the waiting room, all that kind of stuff. we're going to, it's free virtual. So your, your primary care is, is, is included in your membership. So you just talk to the same doc every time virtual, um, you know, a couple of times a year. And if you have any other issues throughout the year, you have his, his or her phone number,

you can call them, you can text them. Um, and that's included in your membership. So, you know, and I think again, the Bitcoin community just being a little more technologically advanced than the typical American I think will dig being able to do their primary care virtually as opposed to having to show up in the office. Yeah. Another thing, again, going back to like Bitcoiners, tending to be younger and maybe more in shape,

like how can we shift, and this is like a more broad question, but like shifting the conversation from care after the fact to preventative care, right? We need people to be healthier. I mean, obviously we have diabetes, heart disease are through the roof in this country. Like, how would the landscape of the healthcare industry switch if we actually became healthier as individuals within this country? Yeah, well, I mean, 80% of chronic conditions are preventable, you know, and it's two primary drivers.

It's what you eat and how often you work out. You know, if everybody ate, you know, decent and worked out three times a week, our costs would go down, you know, substantially. um you know but what is the easy thing to eat that's low cost and it's crap right it's like carb heavy crap and that's you know primarily shoved down our throat by big corporations like pepsi and coke and all those people right um so yeah i mean it would totally change the landscape as if we could eat better and work out we're you know our third crowd is actually going to be a trainers crowd because all the trainers throughout the country most of them are 1099s Um, so we're gonna have a crowd of trainers also. Um, we're going to be able to, you're soon,

you're going to be able to, to stick your, uh, your Apple watch or your Fitbit or your loop or whatever those are, you know, to directly into our app so that if you work out, you know, three times a week, you'll actually get a reduction of how much you have to put in. So to incentivize, you know, healthier, healthier habits. Um, so we're trying to do some things like that to incentivize. ultimately you're gonna have to feel it in your pocketbook like there's got to be a way that people feel it so that are incentivized to to eat better and and uh and and work out like i don't see any other way to to reduce that than incentivizing people in the pocketbook yeah yeah god it's all so fucked

like compounded like a crisis of bad incentives in the health industry and then like a crisis of actual health outside of it, which is, yeah, man, you know, interestingly, like, uh, if you line us up against the other European countries, the actual consumption of healthcare is not that different. Like we do some things here in the United States, a lot of cover your ass stuff. Like we do twice as many labs as, you know, European countries. Uh, we do twice as many cesarean sections as as european countries um but other other than that like one or two other little things like the consumption of health care is pretty flat right so and there we're still getting twice as much we have to pay twice as much for it the same consumption so it's all it's it's

mostly in in pricing but i would also say that you know some of the european countries too are also you know way overweight you know bmis of 30 plus right on average um so we got to get that fixed yeah we're turning into that that wally society of like eventually we're just going to be fat people yeah exactly and these these floating uh vehicles that are just getting getting pushed everywhere it's got to change it's got to change and um the current structure ain't going to do it no because like you said earlier like the health plans actually make more money if you're sick so there is no incentive anywhere within the healthcare system for you to get better yeah right now no which is how do you like shake people awake to that yeah i think most people a lot of people

understand i think the opioid crisis specifically it was like an aha moment like oh like Like, these people are not in it to make us healthier. You think of like my generation, I'm 30. I remember in high school, kids taking like 90 milligram XR Adderall because they had ADD. Right. Become dependent on it and still to this day are probably dependent on that Adderall,

that amphetamine, which is not good for you at all in the long run. there's a lack not to get too deep there's a lack of clear purpose within many in our society and when you don't have a purpose you look for medication in a variety of things one actually being medication you know or two it's food you know and and that that ultimately is what i think the the the problem is right it's like just a lack of purpose um and that's why i think of these a lot of folks in bitcoin man like you've you found a a purpose to rally around um which which you know has some biochemical you know impact on your on your brain like man i'm fired up to get up in the morning and going after a a mission and the vast majority of people in this this country don't

have a mission and if they do they decided it's gonna be a mission of ridiculousness like you know we could go through the list of political you know topics here that are just mission-based that make no logical sense. And, you know, it's just a lack of purpose, man. When you find people with lack of purpose, they're typically overweight, they typically don't work out, and therefore their healthcare costs

are going to be, you know, three or four times, you know, the ones who do work out and do have a BMI of, you know, mid to low 20s. Yeah. And again, I think this all comes back. It's something I've been saying for years now, fix the money, fix the world. We're just thrown on this proverbial hamster wheel of paycheck to paycheck, do this mindless Excel monkey work for a job that you really don't care about.

But there's a bunch of people in the health insurance industry who are some of those people who feel like they lack purpose at the end of the day. We're trying to build, man, like a community feel about this. I mean, it's one of the things I really love about, you know, Bitcoin. I kind of mentioned this earlier. I was a little bit hesitant to join into the whole Bitcoin thing, right? Because from the outside looking in, it is this group of folks who are kind of self-sovereign and kind of don't want anybody else messing with them, don't want the government messing with them, right?

It's like a, what do they even call it? The sovereign human or whatever, whatever that- Sovereign individual. Sovereign individual. Thank you. But the community, man, is like really powerful for a bunch of sovereign individuals. you know it's it's an interesting juxtaposition for all these sovereign individuals the community is one of the most powerful communities that i've i've actually witnessed right and so we're trying

to use some of that affinity in our in our service where it's like look man like you can take care of yourself and it's going to benefit everybody who's in your community you can act like an idiot and eat crap and become overweight and don't work out it's going to impact everybody in the community like these are your community of your, your bros, right? Like there's hopefully that will be enough to change some behavior. Um, I think it could be, you know, I think it could be. Um, so it's just kind of an interesting piece of, of Bitcoin that it was probably my biggest shock is somebody new into Bitcoin is just the, the tightness of that, of that community, but also like the willingness to teach you know people not you know with you know lots of bitcoin experience i and i've had

so many people like call me if you have a question or like let me you don't know how to store this stuff like let me let me tell you like here's the difference between you know cold storage and you know custodial and self-custodial you know i'm like oh man cool like thanks for you know being that that uh support um and i think in health care it's similar like a health plan you're out on your own, right? Like you got to figure it out. The health plan is not on your side. You know, for us, so I'm like crowd health, like you have somebody to call and it's one person in our organization. They're yours. They're called your care advocate. You can call them anytime. Every time you call us, you're going to talk to the same person. So if you have, if you, if you have

a healthcare event, like that you have a question on, you could talk to five different people and tell them your health event five different times. And you're like, holy crap, I'm going through hell right now. And I can't get anybody to like engage. And by the way, that my person might not even be in the United States, right? Like they don't have a clue, right? With us, it's like the same person every time, which is like hugely valuable. And one of the biggest like benefits of, of working with us. And that's what we, the feedback we've gotten is like, it's great just to be able to like get on the phone with somebody. And you're actually like, we give them that you're they we give you their calendar like so you can like book 15 minutes with them so you don't have

to wait on the phone you don't have to do any of that bs it's like you've got 15 or 30 or whatever minutes of her time that you need um that's i think it's a huge huge value again trying to build that community right yeah i mean i think a lot of the conversation is really highly we haven't said it directly yet but we will now like the insurance industry the health insurance industry is dehumanized people that are just inputs into the actuary formula of do we give this money or not do we allow this to happen or not and we don't care about your personal um situation or what you're going through there's a fun meme out there i don't know if you've seen it but it's like you know the the evolutionary chain right like you start with the monkey and

then you get into the whatever it is you know it's like all the way up and then it's like it turns into barcodes at the very end, which is like truly like how we are being treated by, by health insurance. Like we're turning into barcodes ultimately, you know, that sucks. No,

that's every, again, every aspect, health insurance, the food industry, real estate. I think when you can talk about like MBS tranches, everything's just an input,

like self-function, like how much profit can I eke out of this? It's not to say the profits, a bad thing, but like the incentives of growth at all costs, quarterly growth, monthly growth that is incentivized by this fiat monetary system where you have to outpace

inflation. Again, it creates perverse incentives across everything. That's why I'm so passionate about bringing a sound money standard to the world in the digital age because again, you just need to fix those incentives. Imagine if you were incentivized

to allocate capital as efficiently as possible and actually work to help somebody as cheaply as possible because you want to keep as much Bitcoin as you possibly can. Yeah. What are the most screwed up things in the United States? If you ask any Bitcoiner, number one is going to be the monetary system. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of people are going to say the monetary system followed up by healthcare. I mean, those have got to be one and two. I mean, if it's not one and two, it's the two of the top three. I think it was Gallup

two years ago that did a study on the most hated industries. Government was one. Pharma was two health insurance was three and it's like that was done i think a couple years ago i don't think any of those things have gotten their reputations better over the last you know three years or two years um so certainly not pharma certainly not pharma no it's it's disgusting how the last two years you're able to have is it scott gottlieb is he the guy is the uh chairman of pfizer maybe he's just on cnn cnbc every day go buy this vaccine now it's the pill now or something oh yeah coming out with you gotta buy the pill to make sure you don't get covet and it's like you know but look we can rip on pharma too pharma is 10 of the issue pharma is 10 of our

total health care costs right so we can we can cut pharma in half and we're only down you know five percent right like it's it's elsewhere yeah you know and pharma is not to get off right they you know pay the ridiculous prices for these these drugs um you know and you have pbms right with pharmacy benefit managers which are basically the middleman between the drug makers and the health insurance plans and they take a big chunk of of revenue too um then you have to go to the pharmacy and they take a chunk like there's so many people in the in the value middleman everywhere The middleman everywhere. Like you just get rid of some of that stuff. And that's the other thing is prescription for us. You know, we send people to GoodRx, which cuts out the PBM middleman basically. And you get prescription drugs for like 60 or 7%, 60 or 70% less than, you know, through what your health plan pays for. um you know we just had a guy he's actually a friend of mine he was on crowd health and he's

didn't he woke up didn't feel good he jumped on his app he pressed urgent care within two minutes he's talking to an urgent care doc he's like you probably have strep throat i'm going to give you a prescription for strep throat at the heb right next to you he goes to heb he uses our our kind of pharmacy benefits it's six bucks he pays six bucks and he's fine within 24 hours i was like that's how healthcare should be done what was that timeline how many hours from app well app he pressed he said from the pressing the button on the app to talking to the doc was two minutes and 22 seconds holy shit he was at the pharmacy 30 minutes later for his you know six dollar prescription for for strep and he felt better within 24 hours so within 45 minutes he had

within 45 minutes he had what he needed and he and he had to exit i think his wife went and got the prescription form right so didn't even have to leave his house like that's how health care should be done yeah right there's not a lot of that you need to be you know and face to face with a doctor what is he going to do like do the little like knock on your knee is like come on like give me a break um you don't need that stuff yeah so we that's what we're trying we're trying to totally change how health care is being delivered starting with the payment system But if you can do most of that stuff virtually over an app on your phone or your computer, like that's how that should be done. Yeah.

45 minutes, six bucks. Yeah. Fine. 24 hours later. Most of the time, the urgent care doc, they will take care of 90% of your issues quickly, remotely. You don't have to walk into urgent care. I've been an urgent care maximalist for a while. because i was like unemployed in my mid-20s like right when i was 26 i got kicked off my

parents health care yeah and i just like yelled i was like i don't need health insurance i'm young i'm fine but then i got fined by obamacare um yeah because i didn't sign up for a plan well now that's no longer in place no so if you're in all but five states you don't have to have health insurance yeah um i think trump did away with that it was the the individual mandate is what it was called got rid of that so it was a swift kick in the dick i was unemployed i was like willing to risk it i was like yeah i don't need health insurance and uh yeah deep in unemployment the government's just like all right you owe us 1300 at the time it was like damn this is this is material for me yeah california vermont rhode island dc massachusetts and one other one i

I can't remember what the other one is. There's five states in which you have to have health insurance. And so if you're in one of those states, you can still join CrowdHealth. You just have to get like, it's called a MAC. It's a minimum essential coverage, which is like another hundred bucks a month. And that will satisfy most of those states requirement. Well, that's another thing about the whole healthcare debate is the politicians. The government really plays to the emotions of the masses with like universal healthcare,

especially particular politicians. that lean turn a certain way. This whole concept of universal healthcare. You've got it in Canada, you've got it in Europe, you've got it in the UK, like the NHS system. Like we need to bring that here to the United States. What would you say to people pushing the concept of universal healthcare as a human right?

We get so many people from Canada calling us, being like, hey, you come to Canada? You know, we were trying to figure out regulatory-wise, can we do that? They are so fed up with their system in Canada that they want to use crowd health so they can pay their doctors in cash. What I found out, I think this is true in Canada, you can't actually pay your doctors in cash. You have to go through the system. So they don't like it. I mean, there was some crazy stats I saw a couple months ago. It's like some guy, I think it was towards

acl or something like that like um had to wait i think it was four or five months to actually get to the doctor right so imagine having a torn acl for four or five months there was another three or four months to actually get the surgery so you're like seven or eight months in and you're now just getting your surgery and now you have another six or seven months rehab to get that right? Like if y'all want to wait like six to nine months for things that we can get next week in the United States, then go for it. Like, you know, have fun with that. Like, let's see how long that's going to last. Right. You're going to have to choose. You know, and I think with this universal health care, one, the quality of our medical care is going to go down because more

doctors are going to be like, screw this. We're not going to do this. Because they're going to get paid last you can't get paid the way that you get paid here um and you're gonna we're gonna have to wait we're just gonna have to be willing to wait months at a time for some of these treatment these these treatments yeah no i also heard i forget who i was speaking with they run a company over in the united kingdom they're like we can poach so much talent because we are one of the few companies that that offers to pay for private health insurance yeah which apparently over there compared to the nhs it's way better you're waiting days instead of months well look and you know you can rip on our health care system the best doctors are here in the united states right the best

hospitals are you here in the united states where do all the saudi princes go you know when they need to get their heart surgery they come to the united states like there are there are hospitals in major u.s cities that have like a hotel suite level in their hospital that is set up like a hotel suite so that they can live you know people can live there while getting medical services and they'll pay top dollar for it so you know the doctors here are the best in the world it's the system that the doctors operate within it's the context that the doctors are in that's really screwing this up well screwing it up now like you think projecting into the future like we should move quickly to fix the perverse incentives in the system because will it prevent people

from becoming doctors in the first place in the future. Oh, I think so. Absolutely. Are people being disincentivized to get into the field at large because they see the morass of the bureaucratic bullshit that's been thrust onto the industry and they're saying, I don't want to deal with that.

It'll be interesting to see how, you know, medical school applications go over the next couple of years. I haven't seen any data on it, but it would not shock me if they're like, screw this. Or, you know, I know a bunch of docs who go through medical school and they're like, okay, I've got my MD.

now do i really want to go and and treat people or do i want to go and work for a private equity firm or a hedge fund or you know one of these these organizations that'll pay them five times as much as you'll get paid as a primary care doc yeah right so why would you why would you go and do that you know i don't know yeah i think i mean i think jonathan 1031 is an example that jonathan's one yeah you know what yeah i don't feel like dealing with all this bullshit um you know some of your folks might know uh ovick roy um you know he ovick is here in austin he's He had an awesome Bitcoin. Ovik, if you're listening, I owe you your glasses.

I'm going to get them back to you. Ovik is actually on our board. He's an incredible man. Man, he's one of the smartest dudes I know. And he went to Yale Medical School. So he went through four years of med school. He's like, I can go and be a doc or I can go work at the hedge fund in New York. And he went and worked at a hedge fund.

And I made a heck of a lot more money than he made in being a doc. And thank God he did. because he's one of the leading, he's the thought leader on Bitcoin. I mean, he had an awesome article out, what, three or four months ago on just the impact of Bitcoin and how it could have on our society,

which is probably one of the most read Bitcoin articles ever, I'd imagine. He's just a thought leader in some of these things. In healthcare policy, he's trying to like get left and right to say, hey, we want to take care of people. We want people to be more healthy. How can we do that in a bipartisan way?

And he's just done a phenomenal job on taking a bipartisan approach to some of these and he sits on my board so he's you know i've got his ear you know thank god um say hey how do we think about this yeah i think ovick's doing an incredible job of really bridging a gap that seems to be getting wider in terms of partisan politics yeah it's you go to his twitter account it's at ovick avik i'm giving him a shout out and it's like you can see the people who follow him and it's like left leaders you know like house majority house minorities you leader like all of these people from all angles you know greg abbott follows him and uh and gavin

newsom follows like all these people follow ovec it's pretty impressive yeah and at the end of the day like he's doing very important work because i think he realizes which i think most people realize at the end of the day left first right is a somewhat of a false dichotomy at the end of the day we we all have needs and we all probably want the same thing which is like be able to take care of our family be able to take care of our health have dignity with our work be able to to sustain ourselves um via hard work and the again the perverse incentives of the system that's been that we've been thrust into um don't allow that so it just creates this friction where you're looking for somebody to point the finger at and a lot of people in the political sphere do a good

job of using red blue um to pit people against each other swiping at branches when we're not getting to the core of the problem which is these perverse incentive systems that have been erected that's why i think like you know i have open on my board because i think that crowd health can be very very interesting to people on the left and folks on the right like if you want you know the the kind of free market to move which is a bit more of a right-leaning crowd we're that's all we're about we're trying to create free market economy within health care if you want people to have lower cost health care right the people on the left like that's one of the things like especially the poor in the middle class the number one tax in the middle class is

health insurance it just is right and so it's like hey how do we help those people um you know reduce their costs like i think the folks from the left can also be you know on board with with this too and they're no fans of health insurance plans either um you know the folks on the left and so i think this could be one of those where it's you know left and right let's let's get together here and and uh and do something special um i hope we can have a good bipartisan crew um as a part of of crowd health so yeah well you have like a free market we're all in this together solution which we're all in this together um or can be if you're willing to pay sure for uh one your community members' bills appeals to the left as well.

This has been a fascinating conversation, Andy. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for doing what you do. Thanks for having me. I can't wait to become a member. Yeah. Well, we'd love to have you let us know. My parting shot here is,

I've kind of mentioned the beginning of this. I went over to healthcare.gov to get my plan. um and you know ultimately what healthcare.gov is becoming is a an expansion of of medicaid you know in this uh it was america's cares act or whatever that big pandemic act trillion cares it's cares act whatever yeah they're very good at naming these they are it's gonna sound sounds good the affordable care act and premiums are up 400 since that was uh done uh it's becoming an expansion of Medicaid. So, you know, they, they took, uh, you know, now three to 500% of poverty levels now fully covered under healthcare.gov. And so they're actually trying to,

I think, use healthcare.gov to expand Medicaid. Right. So what I'm trying to say here is if you like government expansion, um, then keep going to healthcare.gov. If you don't like government expansion, don't be on healthcare.gov, try something different, whether it's crowd health or whatever um you know you are you're ultimately supporting government intervention or health care by going on healthcare.gov and so i'm just i'm asking people to reconsider that and you can drop off anytime you want so consider us but there's some other options out there too but don't do healthcare.gov say no to the government say no to healthcare.gov yes i'm going to use that we can find crowd health at joincrowdhealth.com correct joincrowdhealth.com if you're interested in the

the Bitcoin version it's crowd health, btc.com. It'll take you to kind of a landing page. We'd love for you to show interest in that. And, you know, and then Twitter, a schooner over Andy is my Twitter handle.

Join crowd health is, is ours. Follow us. We have some pretty pointed commentary on healthcare. If you're at all interested in, we're starting to dive into the Bitcoin stuff as well on our Twitter, Twitter page. And then Instagram is joined crowd health as well.

Well, is there a future you see where this bitcoin pilot community goes so well that you just implemented across the board oh yeah for sure yeah it's our i mean it's man it's totally our people you know our people are are libertarian leaning i don't want to say that in terms of like a political you know uh party or anything but it is like a it is a group of people who are like screw the government getting involved i want to do something on my own i'm cool being a part of a community and i think the fact that you will only be within the kind of bitcoiners um you know funding each other i think is a cool component of that and so it could be something that we just

expand it you know to everybody every crowd will have you know a bitcoin component to it because it makes so much sense like why have that money sitting out there in fiat it doesn't make a ton of sense you can i just got to get more people comfortable with yeah with that i mean you can argue you have like a fiduciary responsibility as the service provider to like protect at least give them the option yeah right like have our bitcoin community be like hey this is the way it's going to work and then the other crowd being like hey you can put it in fiat if you want but let's give the option of of of doing it with with bitcoin right like i think that's the first step and then hopefully get more and more people interested in that.

Yeah. So it'll be great. All right. Well, I can't wait to see it explode. August 1st. August 1st is where we're targeting. If we have a thousand people, we're going to roll. So we're integrating with our partners right now.

It's like I said, it's a Bitcoin-only platform that we're integrating with. We'll tell the name here shortly. It's one that everybody knows. So we're excited to make that public here shortly. Boss. Freaks. crowdhealthbtc.com you got it

go check it out we should if we're not at a thousand signups after this episode I'm actually very disappointed in you freak

so it's no commitment just go put your email address I'm not asking for your you know your personal detailed information

it's just your email address and how many people in your family would be interested once we get to a thousand I'll email you if you're interested

great if not that's fine too but we need a thousand to get rolling if we're not there by the end of this week. We're going to post this episode.

This is live, streaming live. We might be there already. You can go check your email, Andy. You can be like, oh, we're at 1,000. But if we're not there by the end of the week, I'm going to be very disappointed in you freaks. I know this is an international podcast. A lot of you are listening abroad.

American freaks. Let's do it. I'll look at my email right after this to see how many we have signed up. Anybody who goes to crowdhealthbtc.com, We talked a little bit about leverage. Originally, we wanted to do it all in Bitcoin and then use leverage so that you could have that cash. We've changed it per some feedback from Jonathan, some feedback from some other folks that we're going to do 25% in fiat, 75% in Bitcoin, just so you have some liquidity.

Nobody wants to sell their Bitcoin. As Michael Saylor on Bitcoin 22 stands up and says, don't sell your Bitcoin.