I work in the healthcare industry, my wife and father are doctors, and I consider myself to have an above average knowledge of the US healthcare delivery system. Yet, when my family was without health insurance, I was full of discomfort and fear.
How could this be? I have good knowledge of the system and know several medical providers personally yet still felt fearful. How must the other tens of millions of the uninsured and under-insured American families feel? I spent many nights thinking about the fear and the underlying problems.
And then it hit me. I didn’t know the cost of any healthcare service or how I could pay or where I could go to get care without insurance. I didn’t even know the price of a standard cholesterol test -a test that is run millions of times each year. There was no price transparency and therefore no active marketplace for healthcare services if you didn’t have insurance. In 2007, our team began our journey to work on this problem.
Fast forward ten years and we have built healthcare related businesses focused on empowering both the patient and medical provider with 100% price transparency while creating better access through a system where anyone, with or without insurance, can get a healthcare service.
Over the years, our team has witnessed firsthand how tens of thousands of people with and without insurance interact with the healthcare delivery system. Our overriding feeling is that there is massive room for improvement.
Thank you for supporting us on this journey as we spend our time rethinking how healthcare can work, not optimizing for how it currently works.