NOTE: Thank you for supporting this sponsored interview, which keeps this website running to bring you uncensored news.
You may have missed this news recently - the health insurance system in America is so broken, that the Trump administration is quietly rewriting the Affordable Care Act and buried deep in a monstrous 1,000+ page document is a ploy to let health insurance companies start lending money to patients to pay for their medical care.
That's right: if you get hit with a devastating diagnosis or an unexpected emergency, your "insurance" company won't just pay the bill... they'll offer you a loan instead. So you can go deeper into debt to the very same industry that's already failing you.
Let me say that again. You pay health insurance so that you'll be insured in a time of a health crisis. Already, health insurers are denying nearly 20% of claims and out of pocket expenses keep rising. So instead of them paying your bill, which is what you pay the insurance for, they'll now be incentivized to deny even more bills or raise out of pocket expenses in order to cash in on the interest they'll be collecting.
A third of American households are already drowning in medical debt — and now insurers get to pile on even more, with interest. While these companies rake in billions in profits, everyday people will be trapped paying back loans for the care they thought was "covered." This isn't fixing healthcare.
This is turning your health insurer into your loan shark — and making an already predatory, dysfunctional system even more financially crushing for ordinary Americans. Classic "you get sick, you go broke" American healthcare — now with extra debt servitude.
On the plus side, there is a company that is providing a solution to this problem. CrowdHealth, a member focused health care company is saving Americans tens of thousands of dollars, and in May of this year 100% of medical bills were funded.
No loans needed. No exorbitant premiums. No crazy out of pocket expenses. A model that is actually working, is not throwing Americans into bankruptcy because of an unexpected health event, is saving people money, and getting them the health care they need.
Andy Schoonover from CrowdHealth joins us now to discuss.
A billionaire recently mused that the ultra-wealthy get the top doctors, the best lawyers, the elite tutors, and wondered aloud what it would take to give every American that kind of access. Andy’s answer is that it already exists, just not the way Reid Hoffman imagines it.
Inside CrowdHealth, your income doesn’t decide your doctor. “Whether you’re making $30,000 a year or $3 million a year, you have access to the same doctors.” Members up and down the economic ladder have walked into Mayo, MD Anderson, Stanford, Cleveland Clinic.
The real threat to that access isn’t money. It’s bureaucracy. As government plans expand, the best doctors are quietly heading for the exits. Mayo Clinic recently dropped a slate of Medicare Advantage plans rather than swallow the government’s reimbursement rates. Andy’s read on the pattern is blunt: “Free markets tend to exit stage left and the government bureaucracy enters as the main character.”
His prediction is that within a decade the top doctors stop taking insurance entirely. CrowdHealth’s bet is that members who already pay doctors directly are built for exactly that world.
But cash-pay only matters if the money actually arrives when you’re the one in the hospital bed. So how does a crowd of strangers guarantee your bill gets paid?
#ad: Health insurance in America is broken.
Over 200,000 Americans go bankrupt because of medical bills every year—and many of them already had insurance. On average, 20% of claims are denied, leaving families stuck paying massive out-of-pocket costs after spending thousands on premiums.
But there’s an alternative.
CrowdHealth is a community-powered model that has helped members fund over 40,000 medical bills at a fraction of the cost of traditional insurance.
So far, 30,000+ members have been helped, saving an estimated $73 million in medical costs.
CrowdHealth isn’t insurance. It’s a way to step outside the broken system and take control of your healthcare.
Get started today for $99 per member per month for the first three months.
Go to joincrowdhealth.com/promos/pulse and use code PULSE.
DISCLOSURE: This ad was paid for by CrowdHealth. Thank you for supporting our sponsors.
The people who sell you healthcare and the people who supposedly pay for it both want your bills to go up. That isn’t dysfunction. That’s the design.
Hospitals wanting higher prices is obvious. The twist is the insurer. Under the 2009 health law, an insurer’s profit is capped as a slice of what it collects from you. When your profit is limited to a percentage of the premium, there’s only one way to grow it: collect a bigger premium. Higher healthcare prices are what justify higher premiums. So the company you’re counting on to fight the bill is quietly rooting for it to climb.
“They actually want the prices of healthcare to go up.”
“There is no incentive for them to see the prices of healthcare go down because that impacts their profit.”
CrowdHealth runs on a flat monthly fee, which means it only makes money by keeping you happy enough to stay. The whole machine is pointed the other direction.
The clearest proof of what the broken version costs isn’t a statistic. It’s a man who was told to go home and die.
A man with stage 4 cancer was about to be moved to palliative care, end-of-life care, because his doctor wouldn’t run the tests that might change the plan. The reason wasn’t medicine. By the time insurance approved the scans, the doctor figured, it would already be too late to act on them.
So the patient said he’d pay cash. The scans happened. The treatment changed. “Now here we are. The guy is cancer-free.”
“I think people are losing their lives over it, candidly.”
The financial version of that story plays out hundreds of thousands of times a year. “Somewhere around 200,000 to 250,000 families that have health insurance go bankrupt every year due to a medical expense.” These are insured families. The coverage was supposed to be the thing that prevented this.
Which is what makes the government’s new fix so revealing. Instead of forcing insurers to pay, the plan lets you borrow. The system is broken enough that the official answer to “my insurance won’t cover this” is now “here’s a loan.”
Andy knows the trap personally. He started the company after that same system handed him an $8,000 bill for ear tubes his daughter needed to keep her hearing, then refused to pay it. Most families don’t have $8,000 sitting in an account.
His answer is to pull the money out of the insurer’s hands and put it back in yours. Once you see how that works, the bigger picture snaps into focus.
The real disruption here isn’t cheaper bills. It’s who the leftover money belongs to.
Each month, members are asked to cover the community’s actual needs, capped but rarely maxed. The ceiling for a family of four is $420. This month the ask is $225. What’s left doesn’t disappear into a corporate balance sheet.
“In our system, you get to keep that money and you can do with it whatever you want.”
In the insurance world, that same gap is the company’s profit.
As the community grows, it accumulates the two things the rest of the system keeps hidden: real prices and real outcomes. CrowdHealth members learn which surgeon charges a fair price and which one quietly runs up the bill. They can even find out “if your OB has done 5 times the number of C-sections as this other OB,” the kind of thing worth knowing before you choose who delivers your baby.
Multiply that across enough people and, for once, the pressure runs the other way. As Maria put it, the model is “forcing doctors and specialists to be fair in their pricing.”
The system spent decades teaching Americans they have no power here. This is the first model in a long time built to hand some of it back.
#ad: There is a serious problem with health insurance in America.
Every year, more than 200,000 Americans are pushed into bankruptcy by medical bills, and plenty of them were insured the whole time. On average, 20% of claims get denied, leaving families to cover huge out-of-pocket costs even after pouring thousands into premiums.
But there’s a better option.
CrowdHealth is a community-powered model that has helped members fund over 40,000 medical bills at a fraction of the cost of traditional insurance.
So far, 30,000+ members have been helped, saving an estimated $73 million in medical costs.
CrowdHealth isn’t insurance. It’s a way to step outside the broken system and take back control of your healthcare.
Get started today for $99 per member per month for your first three months.
Head to joincrowdhealth.com/promos/pulse and use code PULSE.
DISCLOSURE: This ad was paid for by CrowdHealth. Thank you for supporting our sponsors.
We want to thank Andy Schoonover for joining us today—and more importantly, we want to thank you for watching and doing your duty to be informed when so many others choose not to.
Follow us (@ZeeeMedia and @VigilantFox) for stories that matter—stories the media doesn’t want you to see.
We’ll be back with another show on Monday. See you then.
