Ep 41: Solutions to the Health Insurance Dilemma with Andy Schoonover of Crowd Health

All right. Hello. Hello everyone and welcome back to the Yin-care® podcast. I’m your host, Margaret Jacobson, the Mother Rising, and I’m really excited to dig into today’s episode with our guest who is here, but let me just take a couple minutes to set this up for you. Roughly 13 years ago, I was at the tail end of my divorce and I had been working in integrating medicinal practices of multiple modalities into the Western medical system.

I had also completed a wellness coach training program called Well Coaches, and I had a deep knowing that I had the full capacity to care for myself. And probably slightly naively that should any catastrophe befall me that with my master’s in Health Service administration, I would be able to negotiate down a cash payment amount with any hospitals or medical care providers if something dire happened.

But I was really at a crossroads at that time, because I had been covered by insurance with my ex’s work, and I had to decide if I was going to pay an exorbitant amount of money monthly to continue that, which was gonna be nearly impossible as a single mother, or if I was going to step into the abyss of living my true, living true to my innermost beliefs.

And that was also during the time of Obamacare and having insurance was required. And I believe in some states it still is. We’re gonna discuss this with our guest. So I also had to consider, as I was also at that time, voluntarily paying taxes as a US citizen, which now I’ve established myself as an American State National.

And I’m not doing that, but I had to be sure that I was comfortable with that penalty and could I afford that if I wasn’t going to have insurance. And I believe at the time the penalty was about $1,500 and that fee was just so much cheaper than the monthly health insurance. And I remember that to be around, I felt like it was $600 or $700 or something like that.

And I started to think to myself, how could I create my own health and longevity plan if I had that six to $700 a month? Which opened a whole new perspective on how I would in the end continue approaching my health and what I refer to as health creation. And in the end, I opted to step into that abyss where my biggest fear actually ended up being discovered by my parents that I didn’t have health insurance because it was completely socially unacceptable to step out of that paradigm.

Which leads me to our guest today. About maybe five months ago, I was just searching under Sovereign Health or something to that nature, and our guest company popped up on my radar, and this is so exciting for me to share with you because I feel what he has to offer is such a perfect step to take without being as naive and possibly as crazy as I was.

So today I have for you here, Andy Schoonover, founder and CEO of Crowd Health. And Crowd Health is a wonderful option that is helping healthy Americans opt out of the health insurance cartel that is invested in keeping everyone sick and showing Americans that an alternative and better way exists.

Traditional health insurance is often impersonal and unreliable with twisted incentives. And Crowd Health is really changing that narrative. They treat their members like family, assisting them on their health journey, managing their health bills, and at a truly affordable cost. Crowd Health is creating a system where the focus is on keeping their members healthy rather than profiting from their illnesses.

And their goal is to redefine the meaning of healthcare in our society. So Andy has some personal experiences with his daughter’s health that initially was the impetus that led him to this. But let’s welcome Andy in and hear that story from him. Andy, welcome. Welcome to the Yin-care® podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

That was quite an intro. I appreciate it. Absolutely. It is. You have truly a remarkable . I really, I just, it’s so innovative and I’m so curious to hear about how it just dawned on you to do that because the creative aspect of just being open to how could there be something that’s gotta be better than what is existing.

But can you also share with everybody what happened for you with your daughter? Yeah, sure. Happy to. I, this is my second healthcare company. I actually sold my first one and since I wasn’t employed anymore, I didn’t have health insurance. Many of us get health insurance through our employer like you previously said, and I didn’t have that anymore.

So I thought my only other option was to go with an Obamacare option, which for my wife, me, and my two girls, was I think 11 or $1,200 a month. So I, I kind of joke it worked until I had to use it. My little one who was one at the time was having recurring ear infections and so, couldn’t sleep through the night, was screaming all day long. Took her to the pediatrician and said she had a hole in her eardrum. So in essence, the fluid was building up on her eardrum and eventually popped her eardrum. And that was what was causing the pain. And so, we went onto an ear, nose and throat doctor who said, yep, that we have a, I have to have a procedure done.

And it was a 15 minute procedure. It totally cured her, back to sleep in, back to being the beautiful little 1-year-old we remembered before these ear infections. And little did I know I was gonna get a note from my health insurance plan. It was about three or four weeks later and they said it was medically unnecessary and so they weren’t gonna pay for it.

And I was like, wait, hold on a second. Like, I. This was an ear, nose and throat doctor. A pediatrician all told me that the same thing, that this had to be done. And so why is this not medically necessary? So we appealed it twice and at the end of the day, they refused to pay for it. So unfortunately, I had to stroke an $8,000 check, for this procedure.

And as you can imagine, I was pretty upset. So I called my health insurance plan and I said, look, if you’re not gonna pay my bills, I’m not gonna pay your bills. And I quit. So, wow. It was at that point where I exited the system and as you can imagine, similar to sounds like what your parents said, my wife was like, so what are we gonna do now?

And I learned over kind of an 18 month journey is that, we can pay significantly less if we pay the doctor directly as opposed to going through health insurance. And so I come to learn that $8,000 bill probably could have been somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 if I had paid in cash.

And so I built all these tools that allowed us to navigate healthcare without having health insurance. And got to that point of , I bet you other people would be interested in this too. Nobody likes health insurance. There was a survey, I think three or four years ago of the most hated industries in the United States.

And guess who was at the top? Health insurance. Pharma, yeah. For sure. And pharma. And pharma was right up there with them. Yeah. So, I decided to start a company to help people ultimately pay for their,, large and small healthcare bills without having health insurance. Wow. That is so cool.

And so did you started it just, you were just doing it yourself basically and having success and then that inspired you to take it to a bigger place. Is that what happened?

Yeah, exactly. And I started talking to people and it, everybody seemed to have the same reaction to what we were doing.

Like, oh my goodness, are you sure you wanna do this? As you said, it was kind of a cultural norm. We’ve been conditioned since as long as I can remember that you have to have health insurance. And so, I’m just a bit of a contrarian by nature. And so I was like, I bet you I can figure out how to do this without health insurance.

And through adversity comes mission oftentimes. We had adversity and, a mission has come out of it. And now we’ve got 10,000 people that are members of our community that are saving about $2 million a month on their healthcare by using crowd health as opposed to having health insurance.

Yeah, for sure. And one, one of the things that you were just saying how the insurance industry is such a hated industry. One of the things that I think in my mind, the first thing that pops up that was so frustrating when I was interacting with it, was the continued loops of, I don’t know what you call it, like press one for this, press two for that, da da da da da.

Yeah. You’d call for help on something and it was just like a monotony of the same thing over. You could never get someone. I remember one time actually my daughter was hospitalized for pneumonia when she was about 20 months old. And when she came home she was on, I wanna say it was Clindamycin, orally.

It was terrible to give her, it was just like ridiculous. And for some reason, they they couched the phone call and we’re checking up on you. And I should know this, I had a master’s in Health Services Administration, but you’re so vulnerable, right? As your child has been in the hospital and you’re just trying to, you’re like you’ve been in a war, you’re trying to just get through it.

And they’re basically determining whether or not they’re going to continue paying for an antibiotic that has to be given for X number of days. But what was happening actually, now I’m remembering she was nursing at the same time. She was still really young. Right. And so the way I would give it to her was to like nurse her and then shove it in her mouth, like in between feeding her and she would spit it back out.

And so I was running out of the medicine and they wouldn’t pay for another batch. But you’re, in order for it to be effective, you have to go the course, right. But they were basically determining whether or not they wanted to continue covering it. So anyway, I wanted to just acknowledge the fact that you’ve mentioned when I’ve listened to other interviews, how your staff is so personable when people call in and have an issue.

So I was hoping you could explain that to our audience.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the great things about founding a company is that you can change all the things you hate about the alternative. One of the things I hated was, again, having to call into a call center. And oftentimes the call center isn’t even in this country, and I’m explaining their, my, my healthcare needs.

And they would say, oh, well, I can’t help you with that. You have to go talk to somebody else. And then I’d wait on the line for another 20 or 30 minutes and I talked to them and they would punt me to somebody else. And so it’s just, I. Unhuman in many ways that we’re trying to deal with significant healthcare issues and we don’t have anybody on the other end of the line to actually care about us.

And so mm-hmm. What I did when I started Crowd Health is saying, look, everybody in our community is gonna have one person internally that they can call and talk to, and we call ’em care advocates, and they get to know you. You get to know them, and you can really rely upon them to solve your problems.

So that’s what we’ve done with Crowd Health. And people really love it because they, again, it humanizes the experience and it gives us the opportunity to love on our members. And funny enough, about 12 months ago when I asked the team, I said, look, what really differentiates us.

And somebody spoke up and they said, we legit care. And that’s what we’re trying to do is like legitimately care for our members. I’ll give you one just little example. We had a member in Colorado who was hiking with their, I think it was a 5-year-old. He fell, he hit a rock and had a big scar gash down his side of his face, and he didn’t want to go hiking with his dad anymore.

Mm-hmm. And so we sent him a little $75 climbing equipment mm-hmm. So that he could do it in the, do it in the the living room, you can get back to used to be climbing. And with a little note that says, we hope he continues on his adventures. And so the mom just thought that was so special that we want adventurers in this world.

And this little guy, because of one little situation, didn’t want to go out and hikes anymore. And so got a note a few weeks later that says, guess what? He’s going back on hikes with his dad. So cool. Where we try to love on our members and in fact, I tell all our care advocates you have X amount of dollars every month, you have to spend it on loving our members well, so that they feel like we’re actually there. No way. And loving them. So, it’s a cool thing to be able to be the kind of antithesis to health insurance, which is cold and inhumane and almost act like your enemy when you come to your healthcare as opposed to your ally.

For sure. For sure. I know that when people get hurt and big happens, what do they say? They say, now I gotta go fight with my health insurance plan. It’s that there’s an animosity there and what we wanna be is like, oh, now I got Crowd Health to be my ally in my healthcare journey as opposed to my enemy.

And so that’s what we’re really trying to focus on. That is awesome. I mean that is, that’s what we’re doing. That’s what we’re here to do, is to build the reality that we want to be living in, which is kindness and love and all of that, and generosity. And that is fantastic that you’re doing that as a company.

It’s funny you say Colorado, we actually, so for our company, YAO Company is the overarching company, but, my husband does Chinese Medicine and he’s had his practice in Denver for over about roughly 25 years. Very successful practice. It’s impossible to get him to leave it completely and move up to, we have a clinic here in Lander, but at Wyoming, but we haven’t fully opened it because he is constantly commuting back and forth there.

But we are a cash only office. And we do run labs. He does have the ability to order labs on behalf of the patients. We obviously with our patients, some of them are insured, most of them are insured but we don’t accept their insurance even if they’re covered by acupuncture, just because it’s a ridiculous amount of red tape and it really takes away from the actual care that they’re receiving, in my opinion.

Mm-hmm. For us to be distracted with that aspect. For example, in Chinese Medicine, he’s gonna have a Chinese medical diagnosis, but for some reason we have to transcribe that into a Western medical diagnosis and give it a billing code. And he’s not really trained to do that. It’s ridiculous to even ask that of a Chinese medical practitioner.

But it helps us to keep our costs down by just, really there’s no administration on top of that really because it’s just about the time that it takes for him to do his job. Well, for the bill, for the labs will increase it just a little bit to cover admin fees for processing and whatnot.

But that’s basically it, but, anyway. It’s just interesting that you’ve got people all over the place. I know there were a couple things related to that area I wanted to go back to, but let’s backtrack a little bit and if you could explain to everybody what really is Crowd Health, how does it work, and the cost per month and the subscription fees and stuff like that.

Like how does it work? ’cause it’s a really cool model.

Yeah. So we’re a peer to peer funding platform. So in essence, what happens if somebody. I’ll give you an example. My daughter falls off her bike and breaks her arm and it’s $5,000. What we ask the family to do, or the individual is, Hey look, we want you to have some skin in the game.

So you pay the first 500, and then we’ll go out to the community and for just ease of math, we’ll ask 45 people for a hundred dollars. And they can say yes or no, but if they say yes, then a hundred dollars goes from their account to my account. And at the end of the day, I’ll have $500 that I pay plus the $4,500 from the community so I can go pay my doctor in cash, and as a result of that, get much, much better prices.

So then the question is like, okay, so why would somebody voluntarily give to Andy and his daughter’s broken arm? Well, when I submit a bill to the community, the community sees the last 10 times that I’ve been asked, have I said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Or have I said, no, no, no, no, no.

Am I being a good member of the community or am I not being a very good member of the community? So, a hundred percent of the time if I’ve said yes, yes, yes, those funds have gotten fully funded by the community. But in essence, what we’re trying to do is get people cash so they can pay their doctor directly, and as a result of that, get way better prices.

You know what we’ve heard from doctors is it costs them somewhere between 30 to 40% of their revenue to actually get paid by health insurance plans. Mm-hmm. And so if you can strip out all that bureaucracy, all that administration, all that red tape, they’re actually willing to give you significantly better rates.

If you pay them directly as opposed to them having to bill health insurance. So that’s the way it works. And as a result of that, we can get prices down really, really low. Significantly lower than anywhere else. So for an individual, what happens is I will charge you $55 a month that goes directly to Crowd Health.

That’s for us to keep the lights on and pay for all those care advocates that I talked about. Pay for all the negotiators that help you negotiate bills, and then we’ll ask you for up to an additional $140 a month and that money will go directly to another person in the community to help them with a health event.

So you’ll actually know when you give, you’re giving to someone in Austin, Texas for their daughter’s broken arm, so you know exactly where your money is going. If you pay to United Healthcare or whoever, you have no idea where that money’s going. Mm-hmm. You’re actually helping in individually, directly, which is really cool.

So, go ahead. Que question on that. So the one nine, let’s just say $190, and I know that there’s a range. It fluctuates, per month. But is that what you were saying, where I would have the choice to choose to fund, or is that on top of the $190 that Crowd Health is determining?

Yeah, great question. That 55 that goes to us, right? Is, again, our fees. The $140, the additional $140. My mistake, the, no, it’s fine. That’s the choice. You have a choice to give that to another human or not. Mm-hmm. Um, and I say up to $140 because, and so that $140 plus 55, we will never ask you for more than 1 95 a month.

But in fact, what has happened is our bills have been so low that we’re not even asking for the total $140. So for example, in April, we’re only asking for 80 of the $140, because the, we’re, we are only asking for what the community needs. And so the community does really, really well. That means you’re saving, which is kind of neat in the insurance space.

If the community does really well, the insurance company profits. So this is totally turning that on, its on its head. And that also allows us for when we have really, really big bills, or typically when a number of big bills happen at the same time, we can scale up that 80 to the full $140. And then once those bills get paid, we can go back down to whatever the community needs.

So what we ask our members to do for if you’re an individual is, hey, budget for 1 95. And if we asked you for example, this month, 1 35. Yay. You have $55 extra that you can go and do with whatever you want. We’re never gonna ask for that ever again. So that’s something you can do and spend it whatever way you want.

So you’re benefiting from the community doing really well. And that has changed behaviors candidly. Once you get people community, you’re not going in messing with United Healthcare’s deal. You’re actually messing with other human beings who are trying to help you fund these healthcare bills.

So that’s pretty neat. I think what’s also so cool about it is it’s retraining us on a societal level to be generous once again, because we’ve just been, and, no judgment on anybody. We’ve just been programmed to take care of ourselves because it does feel like we’ve been in this, like war with everything else around us. But to create a system that incentivizes people to be decent human beings again, it’s like, that’s what I mean. It’s just got so many great things because not only are you taking care of people in a time of what can be a crisis for them, you’re also allowing everybody else to feel what it feels like to be generous, which is huge.

Amen. That’s one of our kind of core principles is generosity. I agree with you that we’ve been conditioned not to take care of other human beings around us, and from my perspective it’s because insurance companies have said, hey, you don’t have to worry about them. We got them. Or it’s the government who said, don’t worry about them.

We’ve got them. In reality, we, this community should take care of our own, from my perspective. Mm-hmm. Um, and be generous with one another and love each other and be kind to one another. And so we’re trying to reinstill that through this community funding. And I’ll tell you just a quick story where our number one request for bills is babies.

Um mm-hmm. So just lots of, we have lots of people in their twenties and thirties and early forties. Mm-hmm. And they’re having babies. And so that happens. And unfortunately with that comes miscarriages. Mm-hmm. And so we’ve sent out requests to help people with a miscarriage. And we’ve had women come back to us, especially being like, I know what this person is going through.

I know the pain they’re feeling. I, I, I know just like the distress that family is going through. Instead of a hundred dollars this month, can I give $200? Wow. And it’s really just shows the impact of like, you’re actually, what we say is fund humans, not health insurance. So you’re funding other human beings directly as opposed to them relying upon health insurance to get their bills paid.

So it’s really neat component of our model and our system. Absolutely. That’s so cool. So I just wanna go back to the sort of one aspect of this, which is how people so can so quickly be devastated by insurance, lack of insurance coverage, even though they’re quote unquote covered.

And how it can really create even, leading them into bankruptcy. So can you explain what’s happening on a societal level for us as Americans in that department? It’s super sad., About 200,000 families last year went bankrupt due to a medical event, even though they had health insurance.

So these are people who had health insurance and still going bankrupt. Wow. I mean, the whole point of insurance is to keep you from going into financial distress. And unfortunately, health insurance is not alleviating that distress. And there’s two primary reasons for that. One is huge deductibles.

So, I actually checked this year for my family, for the Obamacare plan just to see what it would be. And it was, I think it was 13 or $1,400 a month, and then a, it was either a 14 or a $16,000 deductible, which in essence means that I’m paying $30,000 a year before the health insurance plan pays a dime.

Wow. And so if you don’t have 10, 12, $14,000 in the bank and you have a big health event, or god forbid, a series of health events. Then you’re in deep financial trouble. Mm-hmm. That’s why Crowd Health, we just ask you to come up with the first 500 before we submit the rest of the community.

Pretty much everybody can figure out a way to come up with $500 and so we wanna keep people from going into financial distress. So that’s reason number one is these really high deductibles. Reason number two, and people don’t understand this, is that about 20% of bills that did health insurance plans are denied.

So, um, you know, are denied that unfor. Yeah. So unfortunately, you know, I five and I had to stroke an $8,000 check. But not everybody’s got $8,000 in their bank account so that when they get it declined, they actually have money to pay for it. So that’s the number two reason why people are going into financial distress is because of these bills that denied by health insurance plans.

Individuals have very little recourse on that, government, whatever, and tell them in essence, that’s pretty worthless. Yeah. It never really results in a good outcome. So it, is a sad state of affairs when we have people going bankrupt as a result of a medical expense. Absolutely.

Yeah, definitely. You were breaking up just a little bit there, but I think, I think everything came through. What is the, I guess a couple different questions is what would you consider, or what would Crowd Health consider a a medical necessity? So that people can get an idea as to what would be eligible for that $500 expense that they would pay then.

Then the rest would be submitted to Crowd Health.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, we don’t do any kind of medical necessity filters, ultimately this is between you and your doctor. Mm-hmm. And unless you’re doing something like totally crazy, we, we had a guy who had something, something going on that was a hundred thousand dollars surgery and only one doctor in the entire country would do it.

And it was at the point we did tell that guy. I was like, look, this is not proven, like you can’t do something that only one doctor in the entire country will do. He ended up doing it anyways. And he paid for it himself and we talked to him six months later and it did not solve his problem.

So, that is, the only example I know of in 20,000 bills, that we’ve actually, you know, and he appealed that to, we have an appeals process where we’ve got a group of five people who are members who will look at his, account and our account, and then they make the decision.

So we don’t ultimately make the decision on that. We have other members of the community doing that, but that’s the only one I can remember. That’s crazy. Yeah. And so, look, we take the kind of position of this is between you and your doctor, and so what you and your doctor think is appropriate for your care.

We will submit to the community as eligible. We have a list of things on our website that we won’t, and they’re pretty obvious types of things. If you want cosmetic surgery to enhance this or enhance that, those are clearly not eligible.

That’s not within the framework of what we’re doing. But other than that, there’s not a lot that we won’t, we don’t find eligible. We make it very clear what we don’t find eligible and we stick to that. And if anything, we give you the benefit of the doubt ’cause the last thing we want, again, we don’t make any money from declining bills.

Whereas insurance plans make more money if they decline bills. Right? So our incentive is to get these bills funded for you. And we know that if we don’t, you’re gonna go online and go on X and Instagram or whatever and tell all the people that you didn’t get their bill funded. So we have every incentive in the world to get these bills funded.

So there’s just, right. Not a lot of times where we say, this is not eligible. Unless it’s specifically outlined in the guidelines, we Right. I think we make a joke. We make a joke in one of our guidelines. If you go swim in a pool of sharks and something happens, don’t be silly.

Don’t be silly. Right? But other than that, we’ve had amazing results when you reestablish the doctor patient relationship without a government or a health insurance plan or an employer in between you. We just find that’s the better route to go.

Exactly. We find that in, or I’ve found that on the administrative side of our practice when I was more working in our clinic, and ’cause I took our clinic and organized all the systems behind it as far as just the administrative stuff, the website and how we were billing for appointments and reminding for appointments and all that kind of stuff.

But one of the things that I always found that was huge was that there was something really, actually magical that happened when people paid for their appointment. And we always say when people are coming, because the initial visit appointment is a little bit more expensive than the follow-up appointments because it is, it’s just an investment of more time.

But it’s not, it’s definitely not exorbitant. I’ve seen some people charging like ridiculous amounts, but we really try to respect people’s financial pocketbook because it is so much a part of their health. They get, you know, when you bring fear into, you’re trying to get well and yet you’re afraid you’re not gonna be able to pay your bill, that’s not really quite helpful.

It’s counterproductive. So we’ll work with people in if they have to do payment plans or some or such with us. But I always made them pay like at least 50 to 60% of the first visit because otherwise they don’t take it seriously. It’s, mm-hmm. It’s just a similar interaction as if it’s covered by insurance and they’re not participating in the health, but when they have to pay for it, it’s like you’re almost in a weird way doing them a favor by charging them to reestablish the level of responsibility that they have in their own health.

And I was curious about my experience with this and wondering what you were finding, because certainly people are having to pay out of pocket for their health, for certain things as well. Absolutely. I mean, I think the incentive system is aligned when you’re paying directly for the services that are provided.

And I think people start paying attention to prices. If you were to go buy a new car and somebody else was paying for it, you probably would buy a different car than if you were paying for it. And so, you would make sure the, if you’re paying for it, you’ve gotta make sure that the car meets your needs and is suitable.

And if you got a huge family, you might get a different car than if you got a small family. And so those personal choices are really, really important when you pay with your own money. And if you’re paying with somebody else’s money, all of those incentives pretty much disappear. And so we’re really trying to build a nice balance there where we can help you with the really big bills, but there’s still lots of personal responsibility involved.

Exactly. And then you guys, actually, I feel like I heard you say that, I don’t know how you do this or if you’re just, again, generous in spirit and doing this, but I heard you say that you even help your members negotiate things that are not ending up being covered by the community. If they’re getting something, I think I heard you say if they needed to get a certain procedure and it may or may not be covered or whatever, that you’ve said, Hey, come to us first.

Let us find the best deal for you. Tell everybody a little bit about that. Yeah. We’ve got a team of people who negotiate bills and so we are happy to negotiate any bill that you have, regardless of whether it’s eligible or not. And most of the times this happens when somebody has something.

One of the things pieces, our system is if you have a preexisting condition and you come into the community, we want you to be a part of the community, before you submit those to the community. So you can’t just have a knee replacement come in and then leave, like that’s just not community focused.

That’s not how communities work. And, but if you still want that knee replacement, then we’d be happy to negotiate it for you. And in fact, we’ve got this huge database of cash pay prices throughout the country, for orthopedic surgeons or whatever the specialty might be that can help you with that.

So we’re more than happy to open that up to people and actively negotiate on your behalf, even if it’s for a bill that’s not eligible to be funding. Like I said, those are few and far between, but they’re primarily. For people who have these preexisting conditions. We’ve got a number of people with type one diabetes, for example.

Mm-hmm. And they want help negotiating their insulin. And so we’re able to find them insulin that is significantly less than they would be able to find it through their health insurance plan. So we absolutely help people regardless of kind of the eligibility status with negotiating these bills.

And so, they can also, you can negotiate pharmaceuticals or, I don’t know, even wait, prescription medicines that are prescribed. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we had a member, I believe it was in Colorado also that had, I believe it was lymphoma. And the medication that she was on was $40,000 a month.

And so we went and negotiated with the pharmaceutical company and got that down at $2,500 a month. Wow. So we can help you with the pharmaceuticals as well. Or typically not a pharmaceutical first type of organization, but there’s certain situations in which you gotta rely upon some of those things and we’ll help our members negotiate those as well.

Absolutely. And obviously in the medicine business that we’re in, we’re not pharmaceutical people ourselves, but, my husband Daniel would say sometimes in a medical situation, you need a medication that acts like a dictator to just establish order and then you need an exit strategy to get the dictator outta there.

I always love that. Amen. Analogy. I think it’s really good. But okay, so for tax purposes as far as, because I’ve been out of this obviously for a while, what states have, or how many states or whatever is easy to explain, have a penalty if you don’t have a, an Obamacare or government insurance plan, or you’re not covered by your business, your employer or whatever.

Mm-hmm. What are the fees that people might bump up against if you’ve got an idea? Yeah. There’s no federal fee any longer. Mm-hmm. There are five states and Washington DC that require health insurance or you get penalized. It’s California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

And so you, before you sign up, you just need to understand what those penalties are, and we can help you with determining what those penalties are. What we have found is that these penalties oftentimes are significantly less than the money you’re saving by transitioning over from health insurance.

Exactly. We’ve got pretty large groups of people in each one of those states that have decided to join us despite those fees. And that’s exactly what I went up against. When I waited, I was like, this is insane. I’d pay an outrageous amount more just in my health insurance to have it.

Who? Mm-hmm. Who cares what I bad girl, bad girl. You’ve got a fee on whatever. I asked that also selfishly, because my son is in California and he has been struggling to decide to make this decision for himself. And one of the things, the questions that he had in particular was, I think that there’s an enrollment period to be part of the HSA plan or something like that, but could he use his HSA money to pay for Crowd Health? Would that be something that you guys accept or are you guys not, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m no judgment. I’m just curious.

Yeah, I mean, we’re ruled by law. Unfortunately, in HSAs you can pay directly for your healthcare expense, but you can’t pay for Crowd Health using your HSA. Unfortunately. Now there are a couple bills right now in Congress that will open up HSAs to more things. And will enable you to have an HSA without having a health plan.

‘Cause right now you have to have a health plan to have an HSA. Mm-hmm. But there are some bills out there that will definitely open it up. So I’m optimistic that in the next 12 months, some of these things will change. That’s so cool. Okay, so then this one is my burning question That’s very personal.

It’s so the insurance companies cannot like what you’re doing. Yeah. So, so how, I mean, how are you managing that? That’s gotta be, I just, my heart goes out to you guys. So whatever you’re having to deal with, if you wanna share, I’d love to hear, but if you don’t wanna share, I understand that too.

No, and thanks for asking. Yeah. I mean, look, it’s David versus Goliath, and we know who won that battle. But, yeah, these health insurance companies they spend a lot of money in lobbying. They have a lot more money than we do. And I, I just, and we’ve battled daily with either them or others that are acting on their behalfs.

To shut this down. Mm-hmm. And, fortunately we’ve won every one of those battles. What we think what we’re doing, and we’ve gotten regulators to agree is a viable way of doing this within the laws of all 50 states. And so we’re just to kind of continuing on mm-hmm.

And continuing to fight the battles. And in reality, what we need is people to join us in this battle. ‘Cause the more people we have who are showing that this is a great alternative to health insurance, the better you know it, there’s many other examples in kind of the markets in business where organizations have come up against kind of behemoth, um mm-hmm.

Folks that are well entrenched. And the way that they won that was that. They stood up against these big behemoths and ultimately won. Exactly. So, we’re just trying to get as many people involved as possible. And, if you’re a member of Crowd Health, please go leave us reviews and things like that because the more people say wow, this is actually awesome and really working well, the better we can go to the legislators and these regulators and say, look, our members are happy.

They love what they’re getting. They hate health insurance, so why are you gonna take this away? And so, like I said, ultimately, we’re fighting the battles and it’s an expensive thing to do, but we’re winning. So we just need more people to join us. Exactly. So I put it up on here.

I still have more questions for you. I hope you’re okay to stay for a little bit longer. Sure, yeah. But, I do want people to just see, since we are talking about this, like if you are curious or anything like just any level, definitely go to it’s joincrowdhealth.com and if you do choose to sign up, you can use Code Yin Care and it gets you, I can’t remember, I didn’t write down, is it a certain piece, $99 nine?

Yeah, $99 a month for the first three months. Right. So, that’s a significant discount to what you pay full. But in essence what we wanna do is say, hey look, if this is something you’re interested in pursuing, give us a try for three months. It’s 99 bucks. It’s not the end of the world.

And if you like it, then continue on. And if you don’t then that’s fine too. But I can tell you the vast majority of people who join, stick around because they really enjoy the experience. And that’s, I think a pretty big statement given that the experience that they’ve historically seen with healthcare payment methods have been pretty abominable.

Exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so one, would love to have you just share, you guys have a, logistically you’ve got an app basically that people will get, right? And so can you give them an idea as to how that works on the interface with how they would interact with Crowd Health? Yeah, so if you have a, let’s just say you go to the ER, they won’t bill you at the ER, they typically will send you bills afterwards.

So all you have to do is when you get that bill in the mail, you go to our app , you take a picture of the bill. We consolidate all those bills on the backend, we’ll negotiate it for you. Then we’ll say, hey, we got a great price. Are you okay with us going and getting this funded from the community? You give us the thumbs up, we’ll go and get it funded by the community you see in the app, how it’s going, like how much of your bill has gotten funded.

And then when it’s fully funded, all you have to do is say, withdraw the funds. And those funds go directly into your personal bank account. And you then have the money to go and pay for your healthcare. If you have a smaller bill, like you’re going to see your Chinese medicine doctor mm-hmm. And you pay, you can pay that up front. Mm-hmm. Submit the bill and then we’ll go and send it to the community. And typically within two weeks, that will be fully funded and you can then get that money directly back to you. So our turnaround time is about two weeks of getting it funded. Cool.

That’s really amazing. And so if you’re in the,, for example, let’s just take, like if you do go to the ER, knock on wood you don’t, but if you do, and how does that work, like in that moment of being in the ER? Like, how do you, do you just, you don’t, you’re gonna tell them you’re a cash patient.

I think you, I think I even heard you say you had an incident where you had to go to the ER. I did. Okay, so tell us how this works. Yeah, I was actually on a call, not too dissimilar to this. And I was talking to somebody and the vocabulary that I had went from like this to this, meaning I couldn’t put together a full sentence.

Oh my, I, my dad unfortunately had a stroke three or four years ago, and so I thought I was having a stroke. I handed my phone to somebody and it said 9 1 1. They called 9 1 1. They came and got me, got to the hospital. They asked me, do you have insurance? I said, I’m cash pay. And they took care of me the exact same way as they would have with somebody with insurance.

And in fact, there’s a law, a federal law that says you have to take care of patients the same way regardless of their insurance status. Mm-hmm. So I was taken care of. I got the bills later, and then Crowd Health did their thing. So, it worked out great. And one thing I would just recommend if your listeners take only one thing away from this.

Mm-hmm. Whenever you go to the doctor or the ER, they give you all these pages of things to fill out. We’ve all seen it. One is the financial personal, the personal financial responsibility form. Mm-hmm. Which we don’t read, but what it says is you are responsible for any and all costs that we send you. It doesn’t matter what they charge, it doesn’t matter what they give you, you are responsible for it. Which enables them to charge egregious prices. And so what we ask our members to do is draw a line through that statement that says, I’m responsible for all charges and just puts, say I’m responsible for reasonable charges.

Mm-hmm. And that then gives you the leverage afterwards to say, hey, look, I’m asking for reasonable charges and if you’re a Crowd Health member, we will fight on your behalf to come up with a reasonable charge. I’ll give you one example. I was in the hospital for less than 24 hours. I got a thousand milliliters of saline, which is basically just salt water. Which you can buy on Amazon for $8. Any thoughts on what they actually charged me? Any guesses? Oh my gosh. Was it intravenously or was it intravenously? It was intravenously. So I’m gonna guess there was like an administrative charge on that too. Like for administrative. This is beyond the administrative charge, just the charge for the saline?

Yeah. Oh, I, I don’t, I hesitate to guess. Go ahead. Tell me what it was. $5,000. What? Okay. No, I was totally gonna be way lower than that. Yeah. I was thinking like 500 no way. No $5,000 for an $8 bottle of saline that I could bought off of Amazon. And so it’s things like that, that they can charge you for that if you sign that thing.

If you don’t sign it, then you can actually battle with them and say, I don’t understand how you can charge $5,000 for what I can get off of Amazon for $8. And in fact, I’ve, I actually did more research in the hospital. Can buy it for $2. So, that is a wicked, ridiculous, insane immoral from my perspective, markup on those services.

So if you mark that through, then you actually can battle with them to say that’s not reasonable. Totally. And we will do that for you if you’re a member. Okay, so question on that. And by the way, if it’s on an iPad real quick, yes. Sometimes they do on an iPads. Yes. I, what we say is in a signature line, just say won’t sign and a hundred percent of the time they don’t pay attention to it.

And so you are now covered. If they come back to you and said you signed something, you’re like, no, I didn’t, I said I won’t sign. And so there’s all these little tricks they try to play on you, which again is immoral to me. ‘Cause I’m sitting there in the hospital thinking I had a stroke and they want you to sign these papers that signed your life away.

And so what we tell our members and everybody out there listening is make sure you pay attention to what you’re signing because they will use it against you in the future. That’s fantastic advice. That was exactly my question was what do you do because everything’s on those iPads now, you know?

Exactly. So that’s perfect. Wonderful. God, I love this is so helpful. I hope everybody’s really getting a lot out of this because it’s just a whole paradigm shift on so many levels of empowering yourself. Because we’re still, people are still gonna be touching in with that system as it’s crumbling.

Yeah. And so as we’re touching in how do we consistently like, empower ourselves and remain in our sovereignty and our sovereign choices around things without being bullied into everything. And one of the things that automatically puts you in, God, what’s the word for it? It really puts you in that sort of parent child relationship with either the hospital or the clinic or the doctor is when they force you to sign all of that stuff, it’s like automatically you have to start becoming dependent on someone else.

So just that simple act of saying won’t sign like reestablishes inside you that you have that choice too. Amen. A hundred percent agree with you. You do not have to be a slave to the system. You need to be in control, have personal sovereignty over your own health, and I think that’s the only way that you stay healthy because the system actually makes more money if you’re sick.

And for the love of money is the root of all evil. And I agree with that because I do believe that the system, once you sick will keep you sick. They make more money if you’re sick. And that includes, funny enough, the insurance plans, so. Mm-hmm. If you can take personal sovereignty over your own healthcare, I think that’s goes a long, long way in keeping you thriving while you’re, eighties and nineties.

Mm-hmm. One of the things we say for our members, like my ultimate goal is that, you’re 80 years old playing with your grandkids in the backyard. That’s, that to me is thriving. Totally. And so that’s what we want for our members is to have a life of thriving.

And God forbid no one wants to die slow. That’s the kind of the ultimate, bad ending to a life is, a slow death. So those are the things that we’re trying to instill in our members. And that’s a great segue into the aspects of Crowd Health that really are empowering your community to take, I don’t wanna say precautionary, but active ways to improve their health.

So you have some incentives. Can you explain to everybody your quarterly incentives that you have? Yeah, we have quarterly incentives. And they’re just quarter, we call ’em the quarterly specials. And so these are things that we think, that enable you to get data for you to better understand what’s going on with your body so that you can really pay attention to the things that matter.

For example, our first quarter was a DEXA scan. A DEXA scan is a scan that shows you your muscle mass. It shows you your visceral fat, it shows you your bone density. These are all things that are important to living a thriving life because if you’re older and you fall and you have low bone density and you break a hip, it pretty much is the beginning of the end, unfortunately.

If you’re young and you have lots of visceral fat, and this is fat that’s not hanging around your belly, this is fat that’s internal, that’s hanging around your organs and creates chronic conditions. And so if you can understand where you sit with those types of things, then you can make some lifestyle choices to improve your health.

Mm-hmm. ’cause I think what we do in our twenties, thirties, and forties, really impact how we live our sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. Right. Absolutely. And so, our, let’s see. Our special, this quarter is a gut health. We, believe in gut health being something that’s super important.

And so, in essence what it is they send you something, you take a stool sample, you send it in, they’ll give you a total overview of what’s going on with your gut. Are there parasites there, things like that. Right? Next quarter we’re gonna have a coronary artery calcium score, which basically takes a picture of your coronary artery and see if there’s any plaque buildup.

Mm-hmm. Because what we have found in studies are now showing is that everybody’s worried about high cholesterol, but in fact, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t have any plaque in your heart. And so we’re trying to get people to start understanding that. That’s great. So that’s one, yeah.

That’s one thing that we do. The second thing that we do is if you do really well on these tests, like you have a low visceral fat. The other one we test is for fasting insulin, which is mm-hmm. On a fasting basis, what is your insulin levels, which is a key indicator of your metabolic health.

Mm-hmm. If you do well on those, then we’ll actually give you a discount on Crowd Health. So you get, right now it’s a 10% discount. We’re raising that to 20% at the end of the year. If you can show that you have low fasting insulin and low visceral fat levels. So it’s incentivizes our current members to get healthy and incur and incentivizes the people that are healthy to stay healthy.

And it really focuses people in, on, the data that matters that we think are very predictive of how well you’re gonna be living life in your eighties and your nineties. That is fantastic. I love it. And do you find that your members will take their, because for me, the first thing that crossed my mind was what, when, and this is my obsession with my own health. But, the first thing I was gonna do with the money that I saved was to start doing the things that I really wanted to do. That yeah. Whether it was like, physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual health.

I was looking at all those aspects. And so sometimes I would participate in a spiritual community for a six month period. Or, I think right now there’s a couple different things that I have. I have a program that I signed up for that’s improving your eyesight to see without glasses.

I have another program that I’m doing that’s like increasing mobility, that are just things that I’m noticing that I’ve really, ’cause I really believe that we can heal ourselves and it’s just a matter of, there’s so many resources that are out there that we can access. Which is why I have this, I’m doing this podcast is to expose people to a lot of the different options that aren’t readily available, especially if you’re driven into that system.

But do you find that your members are taking advantage and using their dollars saved to do things like that just because. Now they’re like empowered in this new way. I mean, I think so. Our goal is to save you as much money so that you can spend that money the way that you wanna spend it, as opposed to a health plan forcing you to spend your money on things that other people wanna spend it on.

So, we for sure are finding that that people are really focusing on health. It’s, hey, I’ve got a little bit more money now, like maybe I can join a gym now or. Exactly. Maybe I can do some of those other things that may not be eligible for Crowd Health, but are really important for your, as you said, spiritual, physical, and emotional health.

We’re all about those things. Um, right. So, and, and look and if enough people come to us and be like, I really want X being to be eligible. We always consider that, and say, okay, if enough people want that, then let’s consider it. So we’ve, we have never pulled back eligibility, meaning like making less things eligible.

We’ve always been like, community, you tell us you’re the community, you’re the ones paying for it. You tell us what you want to be eligible and a lot of those things I think are right down your alley, which is people want access to non-Western medicine type of doctors.

Mm-hmm. Um, and so we have opened it up to, integrative and naturopathic and holistic and even Chinese medicine where it’s like, look, we don’t care where you go for your healthcare. So, feel free to go to whoever, whatever doctor or practitioner that you wanna go to, that’s important to us that you get healthy the way that you think, you need to get healthy.

Acupuncture. Historically, I’ve always not understood acupuncture. And we’ve had a lot of members come back to us and be like, look, if I have a health event, the easiest way for me to get better historically has been acupuncture. And so we were like, great, if you have a health event and you need acupuncture, then go get acupuncture.

So we have opened up eligibility to some things that, you know, out of my ignorance I didn’t really understand. And so I’ve been educated on those things and like, great, if that’s what you wanna go and do and it’ll get you better, then go for it that’s awesome.

I think chiropractic has been another one where I had a specific event where I’ve got a condition that the doctor said I needed surgery for, and I go to a chiropractor every three months and it solves the exact same, solves the issue. And I don’t need a $40,000 surgery.

And I don’t need knife cutting at me that could have impacts on me, in 10 or 20 years. And so we’re all about people going and resolving their health conditions in whatever way that they and their doctor feel is appropriate. That’s awesome. I love it. Yeah, I mean, and that I agree, it’s just so nice to have the finances, to be able to have the fluidity to pay for what you deem as your next best health, move on your own health journey. And whether or not that’s buying organic food or like you said, joining a gym or whatever, or yeah, go going to a whatever type of care provider you wanna go to. Chinese medicine is, I’m glad you, I’m glad your community opened your mind to it because it is really powerful.

I mean, specifically as it relates to. We had one instance where we had a patient that had a stroke and had been hospitalized, and the doctor said you’re never gonna walk outta here. You’re just gonna be in a wheelchair, like consistently telling the patient this. We had to sneak my husband into the room because he’s not like an approved, they had to, he had to say, he was a religious figure that was going to console the patient so that they could close the shades around where he was. And he administered him acupuncture and he walked out of there five days later. Like, I mean, amazing. He came every night, but, if you could, the problem is it, they’ve made it so hard when people do stroke out, they’re in the hospital and getting, like I said, getting someone in there is hard.

But if, even if they can get something like that afterwards quickly, it can be super helpful. Well I am just thrilled. I really am so grateful, Andy. I wanna be sure everybody sees, again, if you, couple things, if you want to find, oh, that is not very big on here, but if you, let’s see if I can fix that.

If you wanna find Andy on, Crowd Health on their social media, it’s basically at Join Crowd Health on every platform possible. It’s Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, they’re on all the places, so definitely check out what they’ve got to say. There’s a ton of great other podcasts that Andy’s done.

So if you just search him out, you’re gonna find a lot that’s there. And also, of course, you can go, to joincrowdhealth.com and again, you can use that code YINCARE for the $99 for three months. And I would really love Andy to possibly see if you would come back and talk to , if I could arrange for our clinical community to hear from you.

Because it would be really fun to do something where they could even text in any questions or even be visible and ask. And the other thing that we have that I think is possibly interesting to you is we have a network of about 1500, mostly Chinese medical practitioners that we distribute a widely used our herbal wash product, our, it’s called Y Yin-care® Herbal Wash. And so we have this network of validated practitioners. That are all licensed in some way, and I think they would really love to know about what I love that you have to offer too. So would be great to have you back.

I’m so, so thankful. Thank you so much for all your time. Is there anything else that you feel like everybody should know before we wrap up here? I’ve got one more just quick story and that is that, and I think it kind of like encapsulate who’s who our members are. I won’t ask you another really hard question, but, many people don’t understand that about 1.6% of babies are born at home.

With Crowd Health. 50% of babies are born at home. So we have a community of people who truly want to exit this system, that want to be empowered and to make their own healthcare decisions. That’s what we’re trying to promote. So if people are out there who are listening or watching fall into that category, we’d love to have you.

So yeah. Use, use YINCARE. Absolutely. 99 bucks a month for the first three months. I’m glad you mentioned that ’cause I did hear about that as well. And, yeah, that is actually, I’m gonna, I’m gonna add my little piece on there because it is a big thing for me. I feel like the major trauma that is had with us in controlling us as humans happens right there at birth and it happens in a medical care system.

And it doesn’t always, it doesn’t always. There, there’s a lot of different aspects to it. I am really involved in the sovereign birth community in, the Free Birth Society. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. Mm-hmm. So, I am a big proponent of people having their babies at home, and I just love that.

And there are, like, even if you’re, even if you’re gonna free birth, there’s gonna be some expenses that may come from that. You know, if you’re wanting, what they call a radical birth keeper that’s there with you to support you, that’s an alternative to having a midwife or a medical-based midwife or these other things.

So there’s a lot of different options to stop the madness. Well, I love that. I love that. But like I said, that I feel like that encapsulates our community. Pretty well. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much, Andy. It was really just such a pleasure to have you here today and I look forward to having you back.

Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. Okay.