The best health insurance for you.

For the average person with no significant expensive chronic problems, the best insurance strategy for you is:

• Purchase a high deductible health plan for $140 a month (ideally with an associated Health Savings Account (HSA))
• Discontinue the traditional, expensive pre-paid health care plan we’re all used to (say this costs $600 a month ($7200 a year))
• Put the cost difference of the two plans into your Health Savings Account - over the course of the year you would have $5,520 in your HSA with money that you don’t have to pay taxes on (tax savings of $1,600)
• Pay cash for health care out of this account knowing the average person will spend over $10,000 in a given year only once every 10 years. By paying cash, you get real customer service for health care and can go anywhere you’d like without annoying in/out of network restrictions and wondering whether or not your insurance covers things you want most (like therapy visits)
• Earn interest on the pre-tax dollars in your HSA that roll over year to year and always maintain this $10,000 health care “buffer.” After a few years, you won’t have to put hardly any money into this account besides what you’ve used.

You’ll save over $50,000 in 10 years by doing this and be able to use this money for other investments.

Sean, Devlyn, and I spoke at the Apple Store in Soho last night to a crowd of about 50 people who were gracious and interested enough to trek out in the cold to hear all about Hello Health. It was a much different format than we’ve ever done. Just a 10 minute introduction to Hello Health, a tour of the new platform, and then about an hour and 15 minutes of discussion. I was absolutely fascinated by the depth of the questions from the audience. There were friends, artists (the above drawing was done by Jason Polan - the amazing artist behind the Every Person in New York project and the artist who drew the new Hello Health movies you’ll see when we launch our new site soon), cancer survivors and the gentleman who runs an online community of 500,000 cancer patients called ACOR.org, other health professionals, alternative health professionals, Organized Wisdom, and many others I’m sure I’ve failed to mention.

This is what Hello Health is about - a discussion involving health professionals, patients, and anyone else who wants to join to make health care better.

Want a vision of government run health care?: Post Office Could Cut One Day of Delivery--Tuesday

This is what the government running something looks like. It’s pension workers, bureacracy, and Windows 95.

And there continues to be all this talk about single payer, and universal coverage, and big government in health care. I don’t think people stand back and think:

What does the government run well?

How does the USPS compare to FedEx?

We don’t need government running health care. We need transparency. We need payment based on quality medicine, not quantity medicine. We need patients to be real consumers, like they are when they’re purchasing Lasik or enhanced breasts, or buying a plane ticket on kayak or purchasing medical care at Bumrungrad - take a look, Bumrungrad created the ideal health care consumer market. We need people spending their own money on health care, say, up to 10% of their income, after which, health insurance kicks in. People need transparency, their foot in the game, and real consumer empowerment. Health care needs to be internetized.

The last thing we want is the Titanic running what’s currently an already sinking ship.

What Would Google Do?

I’ve been reading this book on my kindle…absolutely love the book and the kindle.

• Customers are now in charge. They can be heard around the globe and have an impact on huge institutions in an instant.
• People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you—or against you.
• The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches.
• “Markets are conversations,” decreed The Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work of the internet age, in 2000. That means the key skill in any organization today is no longer marketing but conversing.
• We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. The control of products or distribution will no longer guarantee a premium and a profit.
• Enabling customers to collaborate with you—in creating, distributing, marketing, and supporting products—is what creates a premium in today’s market.
• The most successful enterprises today are networks—which extract as little value as possible so they can grow as big as possible—and the platforms on which those networks are built.
• Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is.

What Do The American People Want?

#7…Get the insurance companies out of health care.

Seems to be pretty popular. Since the rise of mainstream managed care in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, sure seems like they’ve done a horrible job managing the cost of health care (aka, doing what they say they’re supposed to do).

Instead, insurance companies are just making everyone’s lives harder. But they don’t care since their revenues are still flowing in.

This chart is from this data that shows per capita spending on health care. We all started out equal in the 70’s until someone got the bright idea that managing health care in America would save us all money. Well, as you see, managed care simply raises the cost of health care.

The average health insurance premium costs 84% of average unemployment benefits

So if you lose your job and get unemployment benefits and still want to have some sort of health insurance, 84% of your benefits will go toward having health insurance.

We’re subsidizing a horribly inefficient and criminally perversely incented system that rewards doctors and hospitals for doing more office visits, more tests, and more procedures.

It’s sinking our country, but the revenues are continuing to stream in to the health insurance companies. They invest more in trying to improve their profits. They ruin the doctor profession (we have to see more and more of you to maintain our current decreasing salary). And they’re ruining everyone’s economic well-being, except for themselves. Because they’ve convinced us that health insurance is pre-paid health care, rather than true insurance - protection from catastrophic loss.

I’ll say it again:

“If we thought of health insurance like we think of home insurance, we’d be going through our home insurance companies to buy new lightbulbs or paint to paint our walls. Health insurance needs to be fundamentally changed so that it stops being pre-payment for health care. We need to start thinking of health insurance as true insurance, not pre-payment and management of your health.”

Can you imagine the expense of purchasing groceries if we all had to hire someone to purchase our groceries for us and perform thousands of dollars of tests on us every month to determine the right kind of food we eat?

Why not just go down the street to the market and buy your food from supermarkets competing on price and quality?

Food is a right. Health care is a right. Health management that costs two to three times as much as it should is criminal.

outside.in - Radar

Outside.in is probably one of the most relevant ideas to come to fruition on the internet in the recent past (well, at least until the iPhone 2.0 hits the markets on July 11 allowing us to have a full-fledged computer connected to the internet with full knowledge of where you are at any point).  

Outside.in aggregates blog posts from your immediate neighborhood.  It localizes blog posts allowing you to connect with like-minded neighbors.  The internet at one point was all about connecting the world.  It’s now evolved into connecting you with your neighbors — a much more relevant and meaningful way to live.  

This is the first of many Hello Health ads directed by the one and only Ben Dickinson, a lovely and damn intelligent guy. He’s quite an accomplished director. He did the latest LCD Soundsystem video North American Scum (amongst many others).

And we also saw the first ideas from The Barbarian Group yesterday.  They’re total geniuses and I can’t wait to see the final website and marketing strategies they come up with for Hello Health.   

Are we starting a revolution?  Sure, why not?  Or maybe we’re just paying attention to the obvious — that traditional doctors are inaccessible and feel that they don’t have to play by consumer rules and expectations in this modern, connected, technologically advanced culture.  Maybe we’re just creating a national brand of healthcare delivery by creating the most powerful platform in healthcare, partnering with the right doctors who find us and would make amazing Hello Health doctors, and advertising to consumers that they can have an accessible doctor.  Consumers have better things to do than wait around on this antiquated healthcare system.

I know I do.

Are we just doctors for hipsters?  Yes and no.  Of course, we could simply market ourselves to individuals within a neighborhood.  But we can also sell our services to small, medium, and large corporations who need help managing their employees’ health.  We’re their mobile urgent and primary care wellness centers.  We’ll partner with their employees to help them be happy, healthy, and out of the dreaded, expensive ERs.  Many companies spend way too much money on health insurance, especially when they have a fairly young, creative, healthy workforce.  Combine our services with a low cost, high deductible insurance plan and it’s the ideal solution for employer health insurance.  Busy people don’t have time to go to the doctor (nor should they want to), so we’ll come to you.  

Sounds interesting eh?  

We’ll be launching in a few weeks.