TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #681: The Health Insurance Death Spiral Is Here with Andy Schoonover

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Marty sits down with Andy Schoonover, founder of CrowdHealth, to discuss the ACA health insurance death spiral, skyrocketing premiums forcing families to pay over $3,000 monthly, and how CrowdHealth offers a cash-pay alternative that empowers individuals to opt out of the broken traditional healthcare system. Andy on Twitter: https://x.com/andyjschoonover STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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. And it's that time of year again, we meet again. Open enrollment is here. Everybody's favorite time of the year. It's not because of Thanksgiving or Christmas. It's because of open enrollment. Well, we've been texting pretty frequently over the last couple of months

because obviously we've worked together closely for the last four years. I've been a crowd health member for the last four years i've had two babies on it and i've been texting you behind the scenes like i think this is the year for crowd health um if you're looking at the zeitgeist out there the selfie videos and cars and people complaining about the cost of health insurance it's getting untenable and you were saying right before we have recorded that you think we're in a health insurance death spiral yeah i was trying to think back of when we first talked i think it was you know what two three years ago maybe i think four years ago four i i think i think when we first talked we had like 2 000 customers um or you know 2 000 community members and now we're at

15 000 um we'll have somewhere between 20 and 25 000 by the end of the year um and so yeah i mean I think you're right. I mean, this is this is the year of the health insurance death spiral. And I think what's happening is is people are finally realizing that the Affordable Care Act actually wasn't affordable. And and, you know, premiums are going up wickedly fast and people are just opting out of the system. You know, like the Bitcoiners are opting out of the fiat system. I think the rest of folks are opting out of the the health health care space. so the worst one we've seen thus far is 5600 a month for a family of four like that's that's the record so far yeah so this is i was just looking at some tweets before we hopped on and

they're not hard to find if you search aca premium uh it's insane this is trucking czar only employee of my business this is not i repeat not sustainable this is my renewal notice for just health insurance per month before Obama and there's some harsh language in there but for him and five dependents looks like he's going to be paying

$3,300 a month it's his business so he's eating that chunk too he's going to have to pay $2,600 a month out of pocket from his paycheck just to support this that family with us would be like $750 a month yeah and i didn't know i didn't i didn't see the deductible on that but you know ultimately you know that that guy's paying what thirty thousand dollars a year or something like

that um and then he's got to pay the deductible on top of that so he's probably forty thousand dollars into you know his health care before the the insurance company pays a dime yeah and here's another one which is there's blue cross blue shield nine options anyway is that illinois too it's uh health insurance my kid i don't know where this guy is but um deductible eighty six hundred twelve thousand three thousand paying up it's illinois thirty five hundred dollars a month why is it getting this bad yeah i mean i think i think what we're seeing ultimately is that um you know back almost 15 years ago these this affordable care act was supposed to be you know make things affordable

but in fact what it did it is made things way more expensive and it was masked you know for the last four years because of the afford or the um i think it was american rescue plan that that basically gave subsidies to you know the people who were i think it was like 400 of the of the poverty level or something um and and so it masks all these huge huge changes and so what what's happening is now these subsidies are going away and so all the healthy people are going that what the health insurance plans actuaries are doing is they're assuming that all the healthy people are going to exit the system which means you're only having unhealthy people left in the system and therefore they're going to have to jack up rates to make up for

you know, the healthy people subsidizing the unhealthy people. I mean, that's the only way that health insurance works is healthy people subsidizing unhealthy people, right? And so the mechanics just don't work when all the healthy people exit the system. So that's ultimately what's going down here. You know, we see above inflationary rates for all the medical services and things like that, but that's not what's going to increase ACA by 18%. I mean, it's a chunk of it but that's that's not what it is it's more just the the population of patients within these plans are getting sicker does the government have a plan to solve this no there's no there's no plan to solve this i mean even i i i won't say who but i i saw a state rep or an excuse me a u.s

rep at my funny enough my my daughter's uh school's fundraiser so i went up to him i was like what's the what's the what's the option he's like we have none we we have the the republicans have no alternative they have no solution to the to the problem um and i don't think anything iterative gets there i mean i think i said it last time i got a whole bunch of shit for it because everybody online is like you know i said burn we got to burn the system down and start over again because there's no iterative way of getting back to you know something that's actually feasible you know and and then the left basically says oh this shows we have to have medicare for all and we know what happens when you know the government gets involved in this stuff

right so we're either at what we have or medicare for all and the republicans really haven't put together you know a a plan for you know what there is but i don't like government involvement in anything we do but i think that people maybe should have a choice where let us healthy people have access to private plans of healthy people. And we're going to pay way, way less. And maybe there's some government subsidization of the sick or something. Maybe there's a hybrid system here that works. Again, I know we're all Bitcoiners. I don't want the government involved. But at some point, for these sick people, unless we want to continue to subsidize them, let's let the healthy people have our plans and the unhealthy people have their plans. And, you know, if that's not

enough of an incentive to stay healthy, I don't know what it is, right? Like the last thing you want to do is jump on a government, you know, unhealthy person plan. So it would have to be government subsidized, which means it's a taxpayer type of deal. But I think it's actually going to be less than what they're spending on the ACA this year. So I think it's not, you know, massive amounts more money going out the out the door um but i think there's got to be some kind of significant change to the system to get this thing right sized because i don't i don't see any other options honestly i wonder everybody can join crowd health that would solve it yeah i wonder if trump's i'm sure you saw the announcement earlier this week i think it

was yesterday or the day before about discounted ozempic like do you think they're seeing this problem and to your point what is driving the cost up is the unhealthy people and was this ozempic move like okay let's make ozempic cheap for people so that we can try to make them skinnier and i don't i'm not going to speak to the efficacy of ozempic i know there's many people are for it many were against it and many who believe that there hasn't been enough time to really understand how it affects people in the long term but i think i would not be shocked if the ozempic discounts that the government is sort of forcing on the market is a recognition of okay we've got these massive health care costs are only ballooning going to continue to balloon

they're predominantly driven due to the fact that we have to provide health care to people that are willfully unhealthy obese have heart disease i mean look i think that there's something to be said for people who are significantly overweight who have diabetes and all these other you know conditions to take something like this to get them down to a weight that's manageable once they get down to that weight i don't know how you'd structure this but like once they get down to this that weight then they're like okay now you got to pay it for yourself for it yourself like so it's not a burden on others or um you've got to keep the weight off right like you can't go back because everything that i've seen is you know is epic is great until you get off it then

you gain all the weight back so you know i don't think we're in a structure where you can pay a thousand dollars a month or whatever it is i know that he said he's going to bring it down to what 150 or something like that um you just can't continue to do that without you know the person making the lifestyle choices having some skin in the game you know because if that happens it's you and i the taxpayers are going to pay this and for the rest of their life which is not scalable we just can't we just can't do that right um so i think i think people have to pay out of their pocket for it at some point or they're going to make lifestyle changes i think the latter would be preferable that's why for sure 100 yeah but i think that you know incentives are everything

so if you're stuck with this situation in which you have to make a lifestyle change or you have to come out of pocket for 200 bucks a month or what you know whatever it ends up being to the consumer, then I think incentives might change some, some, some lifestyle changes. I don't know if 200 bucks a month or 150 or whatever it is, is, is enough, but I know it's got to hit their pocket. Yeah. Well, this is something you focus on pretty heavily at crowd health is making sure that community members are doing their best to remain healthy as well for the benefit of the wider community. Yeah. I mean, I ultimately think that the healthy people should be paying less than unhealthy people. You know, and I think in many, in many parts of society, people are like, oh,

that's, that's, that's awful for you to say, but it looked, you know, if people are putting into work to be healthy, then they should be paying less. They should be paying less for, for healthcare services than the people who are, who are unhealthy. Right. And so, you know, we've got a, we've got a program at CrowdHealth where we've got three different tests that you can take. And if you are in the top quartile for those tests, I mean, you know, like in the top quartile healthiest then you get a 20 discount on on your crowd health so in essence those who are taking better care of themselves are paying less and ultimately i think that's that's the case i think we talked before on your other part on previous podcasts where you know you do that for help for

uh for car insurance you know you these car insurance yeah you like you know stick something in your in your car or you have an app or something that shows how good of a driver you are if you're a good driver you pay less you're not a good driver you pay more i mean that seems like a reasonable a reasonable thing but for health care for some reason it's you know appalling to a lot of people that i would ever even recommend that um but i think ultimately that's where we have to go so people feel it in their pocketbooks or else they're just they're they're going to the grocery store with somebody else's credit card yeah right no and to my point of the uh opening sort of statement like i feel like this year particularly i don't know if you're seeing it

and observing it yourself but it feels like with these preview increases it's gotten to the point where it's forcing many people to seriously reconsider whether or not they want to engage in health insurance because it's beginning to materially hit their pocketbooks yeah i think that's right and that's what i think is kind of why people are forecasting the the death spiral of health insurance and what are the incentives for me right if i'm going to pay two thousand a month, so $24,000 a year plus a $10,000 deductible, $34,000. If I'm a healthy person, I look at that and say, what's the probability that I'm going to have $34,000 worth of healthcare expenses this year? And for most of us, it's incredibly low, half a percent, a percent,

something like that. And so people just do the math and know Bitcoiners are great at this and work on probabilities. And most people are being like, it's just not worth it. I'm just going to self-fund. And if God forbid something happens, I'll, you know, try to negotiate the shit out of it. And, you know, ultimately that's what we do at CrowdHealth. And we probably should have just like a negotiating product. Like, Hey, if you're uninsured and you just want us to help you negotiate, we should have a negotiation product. But, you know, I think that's, I think that's the mindset that people are taking right now. And so I think a lot of people are just going to dump health insurance and start paying, paying on their own, which ultimately I think is a good

thing because I think people need to, you know, need to feel the consequences of the healthcare decisions that they're making. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin,

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whole other aspect of it and why i love our ongoing conversations i mean i sent you this tweet i forget it was yesterday the day before but that individual uh macund mohan tweeted that he took one of his hospital bills and fed it to claude and basically it highlighted how the hospital was double triple quadruple charging him for things that didn't make any sense and it was able to reduce his bill down by like 85 just by giving him some advice on how the system actually works so you have this inflated cost being driven by the unhealthy member of societies that are driving actual cost up and then you have this sort of administrative bloat and it's uh what it goes would you call it fraud like whatever whatever it is that is i mean i would call it fraud yeah

fraud on top of it by the hospital system to try to gouge you for even more yeah i mean we we um we also have our internal you know ai um platform that we don't we use we don't use claude we use a different kind of platform built on another lom that's all you know, HIPAA compliant and stuff. So I'm not giving away data that does the same thing, but we pair it with what we know that hospital has done in the past. So it basically looks for shenanigans that they've done in the past. Plus, what have they been willing to negotiate to in the past? So if you combine just kind of fraudulent billing activities with what they've tried to do in the past with what they've been willing to take in terms of payment in the past that i think is the

the magic trio where you can get the absolute best prices and that's ultimately what what we're what we're good at is getting that that best price um because you can you can you know take a fifty thousand dollar bill and say you made one mistake and it goes down to forty two thousand dollars which is awesome but how do you get it down to something actually manageable um because the forty 2000 is still probably 400 or 500 percent you know higher than medicare um which you should be at kind of 125 to 150 percent of medicare maybe that's a fair price and so if you don't know that then you know how are you gonna really negotiate that bill because that's why i think errors is one component of a kind of a broader negotiation picture um that we really use on our side to

ensure that that our members are getting the best price so and i think this you know i think it is fraudulent um i you know you i was in bitcoin commons just a year and a half ago and i had my issue where i had you know i thought i was having a stroke um and thank god parker was right outside the the office i was like parker call 9-1-1 i think will actually called 9-1-1 or you know one of the two of them did and um you know i went to the hospital and they put me in on an iv um even though i wasn't dehydrated so it's an iv i was on an iv for 12 hours it was a thousand milliliters i can buy that off of amazon for eight dollars the hospital can buy it for two dollars i got charged five thousand dollars for a bag a thousand milliliter bag of saline solution

that's insane salt water it's salt water people like that that's what that's what this is and that's that's the egregiousness of these hospitals when they try to do this crap what percentage of bills have errors like this or fraudulent markups like this 80 yeah 80 80 are very very clear i would say there's another 10 percent that you can make a really good argument um because a lot of times they use these billing codes and and they they try to to jack the system so they can up code you so you know for example if you go to the er there's five codes that they can use and it goes from one to five not to bore you but like one to five and like 80 percent 80 some odd percent of our bills are nine are the the fours or the fives which meaning

there's like critical life-threatening like those are the two i mean i've seen somebody go into the er with you know a broken finger and get critical or life-threatening coded yet yet they they say you know they do all these tests and things on you um to say oh well we thought you know there might be too much loss of blood or something and so that gets it to that critical area but they're all they're trying to do is get as much money out of the insurance companies as possible so we see that stuff all the time yeah all the time and we've we've talked about we've talked about this in the past but for the benefit of anybody who's coming to our large and growing show was not listen to an episode with andy yet um can you describe the dynamic between the health

insurance company and the health provider and what their incentives are the level of collusion or sort of cooperation there is between the two yeah so you know back in um 2009 the affordable Care Act went into place. And what they did is they told the hospitals, like the federal government told the hospitals, or excuse me, the insurance companies, you can only make 15% of revenue as profit. So if it's $1,000 of premium this month for my family, they can only profit $150. And the thought process behind that, all these smart lawyers in DC thought, oh, well, we can't have health insurance plans gouge, you know, their members and make a ton of money off of their, their healthcare. So I'm going to limit the amount that you can profit. Well,

the problem with this is, is that most of these health insurance plans are for-profit organizations, right? So they want to get their 150. They want to grow at 10% to 165. What does that mean? That means your premium has to go from a thousand dollars to $1,100. So your insurance plan, the buyer of healthcare wants the price to go up. The sellers are these big hospital systems. They clearly want the price to go up. So, you know, you don't have to, I can kind of say, you don't have to be, you know, a safety and PhD in economics to understand if the buyer and the seller of a product want the price to go up, guess what? The prices go up. And so, you know, that's ultimately what's happening is there's this wink-wink between the hospitals and the

health insurance plans that, you know, the hospitals won't raise prices too fast. So there's no regulatory intervention that health insurance companies won't push back when you, you know, increase prices five or 6% every year, which on a compounded rate, as we all understand is like massive. And then you'll see these entanglements once in a while where the hospital, you know, tries for seven or eight or 9% increases in the health insurance plan, you know, pushes back. And I think it's more theatrics than anything, but yeah, yeah. You have the buyer and the seller of healthcare, both having an incentive for the price to go up, you know? And so in essence, we have a principal agent problem, right? They're supposed to be our agent.

The health insurance plans are supposed to be our agent trying to get us the best price where what happens is they're actually benefiting, benefiting for the prices going up over time. So those are the perverse incentives within, within healthcare. And so what I tell people is marty andy i've got more negotiating power against these these hospitals than united health care which is the seventh or eighth largest company on the planet um and you know so i can get way better prices our members are getting prices that are about 50 better than united health care as individuals yeah that's how that's how screwed up our system is and going back to your point about um united healthcare and the fact that aca was really trying to make it so these health

insurance companies weren't gouging um their customers at the end of the day you had this principal agent problem that has existed that's one thing um i didn't realize until somebody tweeted out earlier today but if you go back and you uh open up united healthcare's uh stock chart going going to max we have aca implemented here around here uh it was trading at below a hundred dollars it's up almost 300 obviously it's down bad this year but it's obvious that their profits have gone up significantly since the aca was instituted yeah if you look at all the health insurance plans um you'll you'll see that yeah yeah i mean And these were these were behind the scenes.

You know, these health insurance plans love this because, in essence, they're getting paid directly by the government for stuff that they hadn't been paid for, you know, in the past. And so this ACA marketplace was a whole new marketplace for them that they, you know, gorged upon. You know, the other thing that was going on there, too, is there a privatization of Medicare, which typically we really love privatization. You know, we think that I think in the Bitcoin community is all about taking it away from the federal government. But in essence, what this is, is this is just a federal program being administered by a for-profit entity. And so you actually have the worst of both worlds, which is, you know, a government funding with a private entity trying to maximize profit, which means there's some gaming between that that happens. And the reason why it's down this year, UnitedHealthcare is down this year is, you know, they have been found to be gaming the system. Um, and, you know, there was a, there was a, a chart, I don't know, it was maybe six

months ago, maybe nine months ago, something like that, where they showed the percentage of people within UnitedHealthcare who have diabetes was something like five or six times the national average. And it's because they figured out a way to code all of these people as diabetics. So they get paid more from the government. so they they're it's a total gaming of of the system the government pays them based upon how sick they are and so united went and basically said all these people are way sicker you know than they actually were by all this you know in creative coding so they get paid more by the

government for these folks so they kind of they um are being investigated by the doj now for you basically fraudulent medicare billing um so let me add allegedly allegedly so united healthcare doesn't come and sue me allegedly that's what they're doing but again go back to the principal agent problem like you said you would like these programs to be private but since there's a tight partnership between united healthcare and the government it's not really that private and then unite healthcare unite health excuse me has all the incentive to create that moat that regulatory moat is like no the partnership is us and the government nobody else and yeah we're going to bleed the taxpayer dry allegedly yeah that's exactly what's what's what's going on um you

know then we had luigi um you know at the end of last year i think it was december of last year maybe which i think did and i'm wholly against it it did it did shine some light on some of the things that you know these big health insurance plans were were doing and so i think they've gotten a new level of scrutiny from others that combined with the aca subsidies running out combined with you know this government shutdown i think there's a lot of scrutiny on these health insurance plans right now and that's why we're just we're overwhelmed with with the number of people calling us you know looking for a real real alternative um because we've built something you know based upon and i you know as much as we could bitcoin principles which is like

the incentives have all got to be aligned for the system to work um and so you know typically health insurance plans they bring in premiums um they have claims and everything in between is profit so what do they want they want the premiums to go up and they want the claims to go down right so to maximize their profit and so you know we set up and i thought a lot about this when i started the company is like how do you how do you incentivize the system you know have incentives aligned and so we're just a subscription fee you know it's like let's just you subscribe to be part of the membership and therefore we have the incentive to keep prices down so that more people you know come and join us we also have an incentive to get your your bills paid because it

doesn't directly impact our yearly profits but if we don't get a bill if i don't get marty's you pregnancy paid and marty goes on twitter and says crowd health sucks they didn't pay my bill like that that's the worst thing ever that could happen for me you know startup so i have all the incentive in the world to to get these bills paid so just to be clear oh sorry yeah you they know what i meant uh i know i know but we've yeah it's 2025 marty you never know we've successfully had uh two children and paid for their births via via crowd health it's been an incredible experience and you said like for us we're a family of five now i think we're paying 750 a month we supplement that with um direct primary care all in it's like 909 50 a month for a family of five which we're going

above and beyond with the direct primary care as well we don't necessarily need that we just like to have that i think you guys are 695 a month um but same thing and and direct primary care too which basically is a subscription fee to a doctor that you can call anytime um you know if you're a member of crowd health i don't know if you're doing this marty but like you can submit 300 bucks of that um to the crowd and it's fully fully eligible for funding yeah so you know we like these subscription-based businesses because they don't have any incentive to see you sick no i mean that's that's the bottom line and everybody else is getting paid out there to see you sick because they're a fee-for-service type of situation like the the doctor that you

go to if they see the more times he sees you you become a recurring revenue stream whereas you know marty's dpc doctor is paying every every month and he's got an incentive to see you healthy because if you're not healthy he's you're calling him a lot which means it's you're more expensive to him so he's trying to he or she is trying to keep you healthy the incentives are aligned there so we're we're huge advocates of dpc direct primary care yeah i mean and it's one of those things too where there is such a mental barrier for people and i know i was i wasn't apprehensive but i was like okay this is new when i first joined crowd health four years ago and then when i originally joined we had dpc in austin we were living there as well and it's a

bit foreign and it seems like you're taking a risk but once you get onboarded and you live the experience for three months six months it's like oh this is a much better experience I don't know how this wasn't the way I was doing it before I'm never going back and I imagine that is the biggest hurdle for crowd health as a company is really getting people over that mental barrier of believing that there is a better way health insurance isn't the only way to do things yeah i mean the the biggest barrier is uh people like what what happens if the when we have the big one like yeah the big health event um and i think ultimately what's changed for us over the last year is we've had enough big health events where people are finally comfortable that we can

help them get big health events paid i mean i don't know if i talked about it on the last one But the guy who I talk about, the guy who shot himself in the last one that we talked about, I don't recall. And I feel like I would recall that, too. So I don't think he did. Yeah, well, we had we had a guy in Montana over the summer who who is who is fishing in Montana. And he had a 44 in his revolver in his holster and he caught a fish. He leaned down and the 44 fell out of his holster, hit a rock perfectly. and the gun went off and the bullet 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 totally destroyed his gallbladder

destroyed his intestines you know he said he looked down on his chest and and green stuff i think was bile was basically coming out of his chest so um we uh you know his wife was with him thank god you know she took off her shirt he thought he hit the femoral artery so she tied his shirt around his thigh ran up to the top of the hill called 9-1-1 um a helicopter came in and pulled him out of the stream basically um to get him to the hospital he went into a coma at the hospital um and you know i think he was in the coma for two or three weeks something like that and then he had to drive home from montana to california because they wouldn't let him on an airplane. He got sepsis on the way home. And so, you know, that was almost a million dollar bill

and the crowd funded that with no problem. And so I think that, you know, most of the people have to just get over the hurdle of like, what if something really catastrophic happens? You know, we got a person at MD Anderson right now, who's got stage four melanoma or something, something like that. I think it's melanoma. And so we've, we've taken care of dozens of cancer patients and you know these other big events and so it's like man we can do this like the community can do this we got 15,000 people we'll probably have somewhere between 20 and 25,000 people by the end of the year that's a big group of people to be able to get these bills funded so we've shown over 25,000 bills that we can get these things get these things funded right that's

the that's the biggest hurdle for people to get over i think is is can you get the big bills funded sup freaks have you noticed that governments have become more despotic they want to surveil more they want to take more of your data they want to follow you around the internet as much as possible so they can control your speech control what you do it's imperative in times like this to make sure that you're running a vpn as you're surfing the web as we used to say back in the 90s and it's more imperative that you use the right vpn a vpn that cannot log because of the way that is designed And that's why we have partnered with Obscura. That is our official VPN here at TFTC built by a Bitcoiner, Carl Dong, for Bitcoiners focused on privacy. You can pay in Bitcoin over the lightning. So not only are you private while you're perusing the web with Obscura, but when you actually set up an account, you can acquire that account privately by paying in Bitcoin over the lightning network. Do not be complacent when it comes to protecting your privacy on the internet.

Go to Obscura.net, set up an Obscura account, use the code TFTC for 25% off. When I say account, you just get a token. It's a string of token. It's not connected to your identity at all. Token sign up, pay with Bitcoin, completely private. Turn on Obscura, surf the web privately. Obscura.net, use the code TFTC for 25% off. What's up, freaks?

Been seeing a lot of YouTube comments. Marty your skin looks so good you're looking fit these days how are you doing it well number one I'm going to the gym more trying to get my swell on trying to be a good example for my young son to fit healthy dad but part of that is having a good regimen particularly staying hydrated making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body that is why I use salt of the earth I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt the earth I'm liking the pink lemonade right now it's my flavor of choice uh this is their creatine i've added this to my regimen they have it in these packets as well uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling you want to work

out while you're traveling but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa it's very very uh nerve-wracking at times you have to explain hates it's not what you think it is it's creatine i'm trying to get my swell on um make sure you're staying hydrated i have become addicted to these it's made my life a lot better i can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away i can supplement i can bring the creatine wherever i need to just put a couple packets in here before i head to the gym bring this to the gym drink out of a glass bottle make sure i'm not injecting any microplastics into my body go to drinksote.com use the code tftc and you'll get 15 off anything in the store that's drinksote.com code tftc

Well, and you've been really beating the drum on X in your outward marketing is that like healthcare should be deflationary and you alluded to it earlier, but that's the goal. And as the community scales, it should be able, at least your monthly payment to come down significantly. And obviously you guys are negotiating bills on top of that. So the sticker price is heavily discounted in many cases. I think that's one of the best things you guys do on X is highlight all the discounts that you're able to get here. Our prices are 6% to 8% lower, depending upon the month, this year than they were last year. So something is wrong with the system when you're seeing 18% premium increases, but we're seeing prices drop by 6% to 8%. So, you know, come join us.

help us help us you know continue to change this the more people we have on the boat the better it's going to be the far the faster the prices are going to drop from my perspective so um yeah do you think this is the year that many people wake up to this if there's if if our phone calls are any indicator yes i mean i was on the phone for two hours today doing sales calls you know i'm the i'm the ceo i'm doing sales calls and funny enough the last guy that i talked to uh found out us from your podcast he's like how do you find out about us he's like oh yeah tftc i was like yeah i'm talking i'm already this afternoon he's like well tell him i said hello so jeremy i think is his name said hello he's a listener of yours so you probably

will listen to this um you know so we're getting people from all over the place we're still about 20 or 25 percent of our customers are bitcoiners which is awesome um and man if we can get more bitcoiners then we can do some phenomenal things on the bitcoin side that i think could change not only you know health care but the bitcoin system or the financial system excuse me um you know so we we're i'm dying for more bitcoiners because they're the best customers too um you know they're not entitled they're like awesome they like they understand you know how how the system works um so it's cool to have bitcoiners as a part of the community um and And so, yeah, I think this is the year I think this is the year that it happens.

So we got we got more customers in the last four days of October than we did in any other month in twenty twenty five. That's insane. Is that four days? Is that purely because of open enrollment or just only only of we signed up fifteen hundred customers in October? um so we almost signed up as many you know customers in october as i had total when i was with you and i think we had been two years into it um something like that um only 90 of them were open enrollment people only 90 of them had one one start dates which tells me that the vast majority of those people are you know learning about the company and and jumping on as opposed to doing it just for open enrollment yeah so um i i think i think that's an indicator of something good good good happening this year yeah i mean we've talked about it in years past about how

bitcoin can help this model but how has that thinking around bitcoin being used in this model evolved over the last year specifically yeah i mean this year i've i've started to have conversations with hospital systems about accepting bitcoin um and i've got some very large hospital systems ones that you would probably recognize the names of who are um at least interested in accepting bitcoin which i think is you know an incredible step and and ultimately what we want to do is we want to get enough bitcoiners within the community who are willing to receive and then pay in Bitcoin. And then enough of these hospital systems

who are willing to receive in Bitcoin to create some Bitcoin circularity within healthcare. The number just came out for total healthcare spend this year and it's 5.6 trillion. And so, man, if we can just make a little dent in that 5.6 trillion of paying in Bitcoin, that would be pretty special. In our database of Bitcoin doctors,

doctors who want to accept Bitcoin is growing. And the more people we have as a part of crowd health, the easier it is to get those doctors orange pilled because now we have the supply and the demand, right? So it's a little bit of a chicken and an egg, but that's why I'm so passionate about getting more Bitcoiners involved because I need people who want to pay in Bitcoin to be able to get people who want to receive in Bitcoin. And so that's ultimately what we're working towards so i i think in the next 12 to 24 months we're going to see a significant change in in the way that we operate in terms of integrating bitcoin into into what we what we do you know right now we're working with fold you know the fold guys well where you can not to get

into too many too much of the mechanics but ultimately you know we don't ask you for the full amount every single month of because if the community is doing really really well then we allow you to keep that money. You know, with the insurance system, if the community is doing really, really well, the insurance company makes the money. In our case, you make the money, but there's a kind of a margin

between our maximum ask and what we actually ask. So for an individual, we ask 140 total max, but we only asked for 85 last month. So that remaining, what is that, 55, is automatically stacked in your fold account. So it's sent to your fold account, converted to Bitcoin and stacked. And so it's almost like a way to, you know,

stack stats while also playing your healthcare. You know, and fortunately we started in 2021. And, you know, so it was a great time to be stacking Bitcoin in the latter half of 2021 when it kind of took that big, that big debt. And so we've been stacking the entire way. So I think people have made probably, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars by stacking sats with CrowdHealth

as a result of just this little cool component of Bitcoin. But we're trying to integrate Bitcoin more into everything that we do. I mean, it's an important part of my life. 80% of my liquid assets are in Bitcoin. So it's important to me to see it succeed. We do have a little bit of a Bitcoin treasury. It's not massive. I'm trying to talk my board into growing that. um but we're we're all in on the on the bitcoin side um and in fact all of our bitcoin members you actually get a care advocate internally at crowd health who's also a bitcoiner and so you can chat bitcoin and health at the same time but he knows how bitcoins operates um and he was at the bitcoin conference you know in vegas last year and he'll he'll be he'll be there again in in

april the uh the fold integration has been incredible because i i have it turned on oh you do cool my crowd health account and like i'll open fold because i use the debit card just to check the the rewards balance on notice my other bitcoin balance is higher than it was before i'm like oh yeah crowd health is just passively passively forget it like you're just stacking bitcoin and you don't even think about it it's it's a pretty cool pretty cool thing yeah do you think um i mean we talked about it earlier like does the government have any plans to change this no it seems like health insurance the industry as you said could be in a death spiral if all these healthy people are leaving the plans what are these health insurance companies going to do

what are these hospital systems going to do is this going to be i mean i know people gave you flack for saying it last year when you're on but i agree with you i think we need to burn the system down and re-architect it from the ground up like do you think this spiral is a forcing function for more distributed health care that actually makes sense and is affordable i mean i think i think we step back right like why why does the government not have any really good solutions it's because the the you know health care spends more on lobbying than any other industry between insurance pharma hospitals they have a massive amount of lobbying in dc and so they want to continue the status quo because they're all making a crap load of money with the

status quo. So I don't think things change there. You know, I really do believe that there's probably something here in terms of, you know, who owns, you know, Congress and the presidency in the next cycle. Because I would say that probably, you know, if this thing swings left, it's probably on a path to you know medicare for all you know so we'll all have you know government you know insurance um and and that's a pretty scary thought from my perspective um so i sure as hell don't want you know the government to be in between me and my my doctor like that just doesn't sound fun i don't want the government having access to all my medical records that that is kind of totally contrary to what you know bitcoiners believe and what i believe but i think

you know unless we come up with a really good solution um i think that that's gonna be the only other option i mean look i'm i'm naive in some ways probably but i'm hoping over the next couple of years like we can really grow into something that says like hey if we can build systems to enable people to pay their doctor directly for small or big bills like why don't we do it this way right like i don't i don't think big insurance has to be the way so i'm we're pouring you know a crap load of money into getting our word in the word out there so that we can build big enough because i think back in you know 2010 or whatever when you know tesla was making its its run i don't think anybody would have been able to say oh well you know the majority of cars

being sold or or um are going to be evs and now here we are right like not it's not majority but it's getting there. And so I think that a lot of these innovations come out of things that people come up with that they're like, there's no way in hell this is going to happen. I think our model is significantly better. And if our model was used by everyone, we could take that $5.6 trillion and cut it in half. I mean, it's probably a couple trillion dollars a year cut out of the system. And that would take a lot of food off the table for people. But I mean, it would also enable us to balance our budget and lower taxes and all those types of things, too. So I truly believe our model can work, you know, at scale for just about anybody, if

given the opportunity. I don't know. I don't know what other option the government I mean, I don't I haven't heard any options out of the government that make as much sense as this. Well, you mentioned it would take food off the table of people, but that's. In my mind, I imagine it would be the unproductive administrative layer that's been injected into the health care system that really doesn't deserve the money at the end of the day. Well, dude, I haven't said this publicly, but I had my first death threat about a month ago. You know, we had this guy who was, you know, parking outside of my house.

Holy shit. And yeah, and ultimately, I got a note that says, I'm going to effing kill you all. And so, you know, ultimately, the police got him, thank God. But, you know, and he all that all the police would say is he has an ideological difference with the company. I don't know what that means. Like, they wouldn't give me any more information than that. but i mean i think you start taking off people the food off of people's table right or their inability to put food on the table and you piss off a lot of people

and and and that's just gonna happen um so i think you know we're there's this great like quote in moneyball and i don't know if you ever seen moneyball yeah i've read it too yeah it's like the first guy through the door is always or through the wall is always bloodied you know it's like everybody who's got their hand on the steering wheel you know the hand on the stick you know driving the is is pissed when you upset the way that they do business you know the way you play the game you know and it's people are upset you know i think more and more if we not only have 15 000 but if we have 150 000 you know i think more and more people are going to be upset about it and so um you know not to play the victim or whatever but we had to like

increase security in our house and and all these kinds of things you know load the guns and you know i'm sorry to hear that it's terrifying take some protection um and and look i i can't say with 100 certainty it was around you know the health the medical industrial complex being pissed but there's a there's enough evidence there that they're really ticked at what we're doing and um so we just gotta gotta deal with that so well i my kids were freaked out as you can imagine my seven and nine year old when the cops you know are all over your house like that's a pretty traumatic you know experience um so it was it was it was quite a a couple of days in the schoonover household well it's fascinating because it is i mean you mentioned luigi

magione obviously we don't condone that obviously we don't condone death threats against you either But it looks like both sides are sort of fighting for control over over this system or the options to access health care. And I witnessed this first firsthand, not a death threat, but like people who in the health care industry that like to chirp at you guys. When we collaborated on LinkedIn to post the AI video that we made, I saw obviously I was getting tagged in the comments. And there was a bunch of health care industry people trying to throw shade at CrowdHealth. You can tell you guys are certainly threatening them. Yeah, like tell me you're a part of the medical industrial complex without telling me you're a part of the medical industrial complex. Like it's very, very clear that the people who are getting paid by the system think that CrowdHealth is crap and a scam and all these types of things.

Um, and anybody who is impacted by the system, the me's and use of the world are like, dude, this is awesome. And there is a very clear line between the two. You can tell, um, you know, and so, yeah, I mean, I think the, the, the, the medical industrial complex elites and the academics and all of these people are throwing shade and all the people who've been a member of crowd health and they're like, this is amazing. Like we have, you know, 500 reviews on on Trustpilot and, you know, 492 of them are really, really good. And if you go and look at UnitedHealthcare, it's like the exact opposite.

Right. So we must be doing doing something well and keeping not only like loving people, our members well. And I hope that you and your wife and your little one felt, you know, love through your process. But doing it at a much, much lower cost than these health insurance plans. Much, much lower cost. Much lower. You get a personal health advocate, by the way. The latest app update is incredible. The UX, the UI.

Oh, good. It's very user-friendly. Do you know who your advocate is? Name is escaping me off the top of my head, but I will check right now. it is um alexis oh yeah oh wait no that's for uh no no no you're a bitcoiner you're a bitcoiner so you have narum probably narum yes that's what it is yeah narum's awesome he's freaking awesome dude let me tell you a quick story about narum um so this little kid um was in in colorado and he was hiking with his dad and he fell and he hit a rock and it sliced his cheek open so he

went to the er he got it stitched up and you know we called him he's like how's the little guy doing um you know narum did and his mom was like well physically he's great but emotionally he is uh pretty like he almost sounds like ptsd he won't go and hike with his dad anymore because he's afraid he's going to get hurt. And so Naram sent him this little like hiking thing that you could put into your living room. So he like hikes around it and he climbs up it. And, you know, his mom called us back like in tears being like, you wouldn't believe it. He's back hiking with his dad, you know, because Naram was able to, was willing to buy him a $50 thing. And we actually have, you know, internally, we like force our care advocates to spend a certain amount of money

every month on our members, like doing special things like that. And so, you know, it's really kind of cool to see, you know, these fun stories come out of these, you know, just little, little things of, of tokens of love, you know, from, from the care advocates. So all of our, all of our new moms now are getting like plush robes and, you know, socks and, you know, like really good, like chapstick you know because you get in these hospitals and they're so like um we've had coffee delivered to the house from you guys yeah we give you coffee like what health insurance united health doesn't send you coffee it's satoshi coffee too so shout out to satoshi coffee um you know who's a it's a bitcoiner so that's that's a pretty cool

cool thing about our our our system yeah you get your own care advocate so every time you talk to the reason i did that is because when i was dealing with my issue you know six or seven years ago with my little one, I would call the insurance plan. I would sit on the phone for 20 minutes waiting to talk to somebody who was in India and, you know, they wouldn't be able to help me. And so they would pump me to somebody else and I would wait on the phone for 20 minutes there. Internally, you have the same care advocate. You get to talk to the same person every single time. So they get to know you, you get to know them. You schedule a call with them, but that's how I want to do it. Schedule a call as opposed to sitting on the line with a, you know,

a call center it just works way way better um i think the customer service is a lot better too because i can hold them accountable like i know that marty and his wife was having a baby and narum is is the um the care advocate i can hold narum accountable to treating you really really well and loving you guys during that process and so you know it's it's it's great to have that accountability i think you know but way better service as a result of that yeah no i can't i mean i can't rave about it enough nor i'm i mean because that's the thing too for for pregnancies especially like you create a health event in the beginning and through the uh obg appointments up until the birth you know you guys are checking in like how's everything going make sure you're

uploading the bills um and it's just made it incredibly easy and that's like the one thing too it's hilarious um i've told people this who are um thinking about moving to crowd health asked me like is there anything bad about it i'm like it's not necessarily a bad thing but it's hilarious when you go into a hospital or a doctor's office or you have to um ear does and throat doctor um for the kids and you tell them you're paying in cash they like immediately think that you are poor and like begin like talking quietly and like taking your debit card or whatever and treat you completely differently not only that the price gets cut by at least 50 percent almost immediately half the time yeah i mean that's that's one of the things i just don't

think bitcoiners really give a shit about that you know it's like it's kind of funny and it's almost like a badge of honor like i'm uninsured you know like i'm a cash pay patient you know it's like i'm a bitcoiner i want to pay in bitcoin and people are looking like what the hell are you talking about what you know um so i think i think we have it as a badge of honor and in fact we have t-shirts that say uninsured on the front of them um which means i'm not subservient to some health insurance company who's going to dictate what care i can and cannot get like that's what i meant the message but i walked through dfw airport once with that shirt on and people looked at me like i was like total crazy person you know and it probably wasn't too different like five or six years ago

when you had a bitcoin t-shirt on you know and it hasn't now it's so mainstream or you know somewhat mainstream um that people may not you know flinch anymore but back in the day when you had a bitcoin on they thought you were not not like a total crazy person so um i think we're on that same trajectory no i can't tell you the number of uh uh individuals working the front desk of either a doctor's office ear nose and throat hospital and when we say they're like their whole demeanor completely changes when you say are you kind of your insurance card like oh we're not insured um it's like a funny social like signals that like we've been pushed into the system it's like fish and water they are not used to hearing that um and i think there's yeah i mean if you

to bitcoin it's like we're using fiat and they're like oh i use bitcoins but i save and they're like you're crazy it's like no well actually my life is much better for having saved in bitcoin and similarly being uninsured my life hasn't uh the quality of my health care coverage or not coverage but health care experience has increased significantly we're fiat poor we're bitcoin rich it's funny well it's like buying a house now too i'm it's uh trying to explain to mortgage brokers that don't worry just because i don't have a lot of a lot of money in the bank account doesn't mean i don't have uh money at all and trying to explain bitcoin to no joke no it's a joke it's funny though what um so so so bust out of the health insurance system like you you guys

have already busted out of the bitcoin system like bust out of the health insurance system um you know and and give it a shot man that's what that's that's my my plea to bitcoiners is give it a give it a shot well you know you can use tftc you get it for 99 bucks a month for the first three months if you like it awesome if you don't then go buy fiat health insurance like go for it that would be my that would my my plea but i guarantee you that you're gonna be you're gonna have a much better experience with us than you've had with with health insurance um just like Bitcoin is a much better experience than fiat. Well, I tweeted it out a couple, I think a month or two ago, like with the premiums going

up as much as they are within the Affordable Care Act, like the opportunity cost is like incredibly diminished. Like what is the risk of switching to crowd health considering how expensive traditional health care is becoming, health insurance is becoming? like you can go spend if you got a family of five 30 grand a year 25 to 30 grand a year just to get coverage and then an additional yeah 8 to 15 depending on what your deductible is so anywhere from 25 to 35 grand a year or you can pay 700 a month by seven grand if that a little bit more than that and

i know most people think like oh i'm not gonna get the same same quality of care as i would on health insurance so it's like no you actually get better because you have the health advocate you guys are actively looking for the best um specialist if you have a special um event that that dictates you need somebody who's focused on knees or whatever maybe or does a procedure very well you're gonna go find the best you're gonna get the best price um and i think the point being this year, specifically the cost, the opportunity cost of switching is lower than it's ever been since I've been on crowdhouse. Well, I think, I think more importantly is you're taking, you know, between a doctor and the patient right now in health insurance, you have probably your

employer, you have the government, you have the insurance company all in between you and your doctor. So the doctor, I always kind of say like you, you work for whoever pays you, the doctor is getting paid by health insurance. And so the health insurance plans dictate what they can and cannot do, what care they can and cannot provide, right? If you take those middlemen out, now it's directly between you and your doctor. You have a direct relation to the doctor-patient relationship is reestablished. And so now you and your doctor can decide what's best for your health, right? And that's where I think we're getting the most upside in terms of better healthcare. You don't have all these intermediaries telling the doctor what you can do.

It's like now the doctor is a customer of mine or I'm the, I'm the customer of the doctor, right? I'm paying him. So he's now has to abide by what I need and take care of me as opposed to taking care of an insurance company. And we hear it all the time. Like, wow, my doctor actually changed his tune when he knew that, you know, I was paying him directly. He knew who the customer was now. And so that's, that's a pretty significant change um and you're beginning to see a number of doctors begin to realize this too and drop out like i had barely mary tally bowden on uh earlier this year and

she just went dpc obviously her story is pretty unique considering what the houston um hospital system did to her during covid but her and many other dpc doctors i've spoken to but sue said i I just didn't like the time I spent dealing with the insurers was taking away from my ability to treat patients. So I'm going DPC and cutting them out of the equation completely. And so that that would be in your favor, too, because I think that's a trend that's going to continue to grow. You're going to have a bunch of doctors opting out of it on the other side. And who do you think are those doctors better than normal or worse than normal? Probably better than normal, right?

If you can start building a practice where you only take cash, that means you have the demand. You don't rely upon the hospital to send you demand. You're not a part of that system. Those are the best doctors. The best doctors now are transitioning out of hospital systems, transitioning out of the insurance systems, and are now doing cash-only type of systems. So I think we will see over the next few years, the best doctors in the world only accepting cash. Like I truly believe that because they're so fed up with the insurance system. And so our system is perfect for that, right?

If you want to go to see the best orthopedic surgeon in Austin, and we send a lot of our people to the best orthopedic surgeon in Austin, which is where I'm at, you know, he, you know, and he only, he transitions to cash only. You're not going to, if you have a health insurance, you're not going to be able to go to him. You don't have to pay cash, but our members pay cash at the point of care because you have an issue. We fund it for you. You now have the money to then go and pay that doctor in cash. So we open up everybody to to our members. And I think some of the best doctors in the world are going to be cash only doctors. And they're starting to see that, you know, Dr. Bowden is in itself probably one of the best ENTs in Houston. Only cash now. So I think, you know, those those types of things are important.

It really is. And it's funny, I know. I think they'd be comfortable with me sharing this because I think they've talked about it publicly, but the doctors and dentists are some of the earliest movers in terms of small businesses adopting Bitcoin for payment. I know this from ZapRite, ZapRite, Parker and John and Will are always telling me, I'm like, he's your biggest sort of cohort user archetype. What's what's that look like? It's like doctors. They get it. They want they want hard money, particularly primary care doctors. I was paying my primary care doctor in Austin and Bitcoin when I was there. So you have this like combination culmination of sort of factors getting pushed out of the health care system, finding Bitcoin, finding like minded Bitcoin. who are using CrowdHealth to pay, and you can begin to see the momentum building.

And we're starting to build a database of these folks. So if you want a Bitcoin doctor, if you want a doctor who's great with, you know, a lot of red meat intake, you know, okay with a little bit higher cholesterol, my cholesterol is through the roof, but, you know, I don't really care, you know, but most doctors are going to try to put you on statins

and things like that. And so, I mean, which route would you prefer? A route in which you pay directly in cash where the doctor-patient relationship is what it is. And you have unlimited options in terms of who you can go to because everybody taking insurance will take cash and all the people who take cash will only take cash.

But if you go to the insurance, you're stuck within this very limited network of doctors that you can go to. And so if you want to go to someone doctor outside of the insurance network, you have to pay cash for it because they won't accept your insurance. And so I think that this cash pay,

direct pay method of kind of health care financing or Bitcoin pay, you know, is going to be the future. And so I think it's inevitable that that's going to take place. So as we were talking about earlier, even if everything does transition to a government based model, I still think there's going to be a place for crowd health because I think all these these doctors are going to transition to um being yeah being cash pay only and are not going to accept that one last thing i wanted to touch on before we wrap up here it's a friday afternoon we should get back to our families but um a lot of people will say well my uh my job they were putting up a portion of of my health health insurance costs on a monthly basis that is harder with crowd health are you

guys working on ways to sort of teach people like hey maybe you go to your employer and you say Instead of putting up a third of my health insurance cost per month, maybe we just cut health insurance and maybe increase my pay by that. How are businesses that want, or employees of businesses that want to use, the employee wants to use CrowdHealth, their employer has a health insurance plan, but they want to sort of reap benefits from their employer. Yeah. If you're if you're yeah, if you're if you work for a small employer, you can go to them because typically the small employer is paying twenty five thousand dollars for a family to have health insurance. A family with crowd health is about seven. So you can go back to them and be like, listen, instead of paying twenty five thousand for my family, why don't you give why don't you raise my salary by ten or twelve thousand? you know you save money i'm gonna go get crowd health i save money we've had a bunch of members go and do that and it and it works for small employers it doesn't work for big employers um but i ultimately i think that the government needs to bifurcate the um the employer um health

insurance you know kind of connection um and you know as your video pointed out so beautifully that you put out about crowd health that tftc produced you know let's like we keep people in their employment cages by shackling them to the company with their health insurance because a lot of people are like oh i can't leave my company because i can't lose my health insurance like that's just a way to trap you in that company it's a sad state of affairs something like three or four million people would go do something entrepreneurial if it wasn't for health insurance their employer-based health insurance which is just un-american to me well i think if you were to pull people that were thinking about leaving their job but didn't that would be the number

one or at least a top three um sort of absolutely they didn't leave i need to help absolutely so go ask your employer like there's a differential there go ask your employer if they can just pay you more and and you can opt out of the of health insurance a lot of people are doing it right now so this is a conversation to be had worst they can say is no um you know and if they say no that's fine but they might say yes because it's it's beneficial for both parties yeah it really is no i remember right before i joined crowd health as a member it was when i left great american mining which was paying my health insurance to really focus on um tftc in 1031 and was in that lull period i was on cobra i was paying like 1800 a month i was like

this is we wanted to keep the health insurance we did it for like two months i was like all right we're going crowd house that's the thing that that pushed me over the edge but that was the scariest thing about going out and doing focusing on this as a solo entrepreneur at the time was like we have no health insurance i just had had a one-year-old child at the time um and it was didn't make us think like twice and three times about all right do we really want to do this um went to stomach the cost of cobra it was just like okay there's a better option what what do we have to look we appreciate you joining man it's you've been incredibly um we were incredibly grateful for for all that you've you've done for us and um you know look

if if anybody wants to join use tftc the code um you get 99 bucks for the first uh three three months um and it's worth a try and then you know anybody out there who's a crowd health member thank you thank you for being members you know tell your friends about crowd health and if you they use your code we'll we'll pay you 250 bucks um as a as a referral fee and we'll pay it in bitcoin too we'll pay you in bitcoin um i would way prefer to be paying our members to help us grow the company than google and facebook and all these other companies right like that's my it's the that's that's my that's kind of my rationale behind doing that um and we have dozens of members who actually get more from us per month and referral fees than they actually

pay for their health care so they're actually making money off of crowd health which is which is kind of awesome like you have health care and you're making money off it it's a pretty cool thing so thank you all seriously for for the support and um we're we're fired up fired up about 2026 it's gonna be an awesome year oh you got out there for a little bit but i think i think you know that i i would um i would concur it's uh it's a beautiful thing the the feeling is mutual you know me and we were working out the same office together for three almost four years uh here at tftc we do not we're very stingy with our advertising partners um and we like to make sure that we actually use the products and i can say i'm more than happy to be uh partners with you

in the professional sense on the sponsorship level because i'm a happy customer and i not only feel safe uh recommending crowd health to the audience that is listening to this but i feel compelled to push it because like you said if you get bitcoin you understand that the money's broken and the traditional system the way it's controlling money is corrupt uh you begin to see that and other things i think with health insurance and the health care system it become it has become abundantly clear to me and this is the bitcoin equivalent of of health care uh in the health health care system in my mind so it's been a great partnership i appreciate it it's been a great conversation and uh i'll be back down in austin at some point in the next couple months

spot to catch up it would love that thanks for having me brother all right peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives

you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time Thank you.