BONUS: Medical Debt and Health Insurance with Andy Schoonover | Medical Insurance, Insurance Alternatives, CrowdHealth

Cynthia Thurlow (0:00)

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Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, nurse practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.

Today's podcast episode is brought to you by CrowdHealth. I had the honor to sit down and speak directly with co-founder and CEO of CrowdHealth, which is a community-powered alternative to health insurance that provides a revolutionary way of paying for healthcare bills through crowdfunding. Schoonover was previously CEO of VRI, a healthcare technology company, focused on monitoring patients with chronic conditions out of their homes. He is a proud graduate of the University of Virginia and Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. And for listeners, I want you to understand why I think this conversation is so important. I think there's a really poor understanding of not only how health insurance works in the United States, but also how medical debt is becoming a huge issue for millions of Americans.

Today, Andy Schoonover and I spoke about the scale of medical debt in the United States as well as claim denials.

At-risk vulnerable populations, including women, African Americans, and Hispanics. The impact of hospital takeovers and the medical system. How the insurance company and hospitals that are really oligopolies impact price increases that have a direct impact on insurance premiums and our out-of-pocket costs. The influence of hospitals on private practice and how this is a microcosm of much larger challenges. Andy's origin story with his daughter. Challenges of medical billing and reimbursement. How we need to be encouraging patients to take care of their health in their 20s and 30s to avoid ever developing chronic disease. How CrowdHealth works. Who it's for and how this is a growing response to our current broken medical system. I think this is a highly valuable and also actionable conversation. One that I will hope you will listen to more than once. And for full transparency, this has generated really interesting discussions with my husband about our own medical insurance and how little coverage we actually receive.

Cynthia Thurlow (3:16)

Andy, I've been really looking forward to this conversation of Networking Wellness.

Andy Schoonover (3:20)

Thank you for having me.

Cynthia Thurlow (3:21)

One of the big reasons other than talking about your company is really giving listeners some perspective on the scope of medical debt here in the United States. As a nurse practitioner, I understand this, but I think that most people don't understand some of the statistics, and I am going to be looking down at this paper. There's at least $220 billion in medical debt nationally under conservative estimates, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's own 2024 analysis bounced active collections alone in $94 to $303 billion.

Do these kinds of statistics surprise you, or are these the kinds of things that you feel like you are spending more time talking about, just helping people have greater awareness around the limitations of our current medical model?

Andy Schoonover (4:08)

Yeah, something that especially five or six years ago, and I know we'll talk about the origin story, that one of the things I realized after I got stuck with Big Bill, was that a lot of people are getting stuck in Big Bills, even though they have both insurance. The sap that really moved me to go in and dig in more was that about 250,000 families go bankrupt every year due to a medical event, even though they have both insurance. So this is not people that don't have both insurance that are going bankrupt. These are people that have out insurance and are still going bankrupt. And from what I've seen comes from two primary places, which is claims denials, which is about one in five bills that get submitted to health insurance plans are denied. And like most Americans can come up a thousand dollars, much less an eight or ten or twenty thousand dollar bill. When you step into the ER today and you're ten thousand dollars in already, that's pretty much the entry fee to ERs nowadays. And you still have the money to do that. And so it's a challenge, denials. And that's the big adopter. So the Affordable Care Act was saying, hey, there's no catastrophic coverage, but they do have the doccables that were all up for my family this year. And I would be paying $1400 a month for me, my wife, and my two girls. It was a $16,000 or $18,000.