Exciting stuff to report about my new company, Sherpaa. 

First, I’m super happy to say that Cheryl Swirnow (Greenhill) has joined me as a co-founder of Sherpaa. Cheryl was head of HR at The Barbarian Group so she knows pretty much everything to know about health insurance for companies. Prior to that, she worked at Quintessentially, a 24/7 global concierge service. So she pretty much knows everything about making things happen. She’s awesome and I’m honored to be working with her on building Sherpaa.

In the past four months, we’ve learned a ton about companies and health. We’re universally seeing that most companies are overinsured and spending way too much on health insurance. Here are some numbers to back that up. Seventy-five percent of all-comers will spend less than $2,000 on medical expenses per year. Ninety-six percent will spend less than $10,000 per year. These stats are for all-comers, not the typical tech and creative companies we’re focusing on here in NYC. Therefore, it just makes sense for these kinds of companies to have a high deductible health plan with a deductible of at least $2,000. 

And then here’s the kicker. We’re recommending that companies then give their employees a debit card with $2,000 loaded on it (that’s a health reimbursement account). At the end of the year, whatever the employee doesn’t spend gets rolled back into the company. Essentially, it’s the poor man’s version of self-insurance.

But by doing this we’re finding that we can save companies up to $4,000 per year per employee. And that, my friends, is wonderful news. It’s extremely frightening to peer in to the backend of healthcare and realize there is just so much unnecessary waste.

And then…on top of saving companies a ton of money, we then give each of their employees 24/7 access to our doctors. So when any of their employees have a health issue, they contact us via email or phone and we then do everything we can to solve their problem. About 70% of the time, we’re solving the problem over email. For the other 30%, we personally connect them with one of our carefully chosen specialists here in NYC. Or sometimes we send them to the urgent care center or the ER. It’s basically like having a 24/7 doctor on your side who’s trying to save you as much hassle as possible. 

So, to sum it all up, we analyze your company’s health strategy, secure the best health insurance plan for your company, and then give you 24/7 access to our group of doctors. We save companies a ton of money and offer them an amazing service.

We’re off to a great start and signing up multiple companies a week. I can’t wait to report more good news.