Deep discontent with the U.S. health insurance system has led people to pursue alternatives like CrowdHealth, a health care startup that seeks to replace health insurance with a crowd-funding model that the company says lowers costs and diverts money from insurance conglomerates to real people.
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00:00I found this ad in a magazine about crowd health which is health sharing and it kind of sounded
00:04like a scam to me. I thought what is health sharing and why are people doing it? What it is
00:09is basically people pledge to pay for one another's medical expenses. So just say you have to get your
00:16gallbladder removed, you'll tell the company and then they'll send out a request to all their
00:21members asking to help pay for it. And I talked to a lot of people who are on it and surprisingly I
00:27didn't find very many people who are unhappy with it. A lot of people are really happy with it
00:31especially because they were just so sick of dealing with their health insurance companies
00:36and they were just paying a ton of money for health insurance and getting claims denied and
00:40just feeling like health insurance was a scam. I think a lot of people find this appealing
00:45because the money goes directly from one human being to another human being to help them pay
00:51for health care needs. It's not going to some big insurance company and being invested somewhere and
00:56then going back to CEOs for profit. It really is a fairly straightforward way of a lot of people
01:02pooling their money together to using it to pay for health care. It's kind of you know what the
01:08original idea of insurance was that a lot of people put their money in to make sure if something bad
01:14happens to them they'll be all set on the other end. I think insurance has just gotten so complicated
01:19and so difficult to use over the years that this is almost stripping it all back and looking for
01:25a different way to handle health care claims. There are definitely some big negatives. One,
01:30they're not required to cover anything. So unlike traditional insurance where if they
01:35deny your coverage you could go to your health commissioner or you can appeal or do a lot of
01:39different things, they can basically do whatever they want. They're not regulated. Two, they don't
01:44cover a lot of pre-existing conditions for a while. So if you got pregnant and then signed up
01:50they would not cover your pregnancy for about nine months which at which point it's probably
01:56too late. And one other thing that's a negative about it is that you have to do a lot of leg work.
02:02So you have to call your doctor's office and say, I'm paying cash. What's the cash price? A lot of
02:06places might not want to give you the cash price, might not have the cash price. You have to pay up
02:10front which is probably not passable for a lot of people and then you have to submit your receipts
02:15to CrowdHealth to wait for them to pay you back. So you know it's not that different from an
02:19insurance company but you have to do a lot of the work that the insurance company would be doing
02:24otherwise. I don't see some widespread abandoning of health insurance for health sharing. I think
02:30it's too risky for a lot of people and the idea that you could be stuck with bills that they won't
02:35pay is really scary. But I do think it's interesting that so many people are so fed up with
02:40health insurance that they're willing to take that risk. And I think we are going to see more
02:44alternatives emerging of people saying there's got to be another way to do this and testing
02:49things out. It's a way of looking at something that's different from what we have now and seeking
02:54an alternative and people seem to be into it.