Latest news with #CrowdHealth
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Bitcoin Is Quietly Entering The Healthcare Sector
Bitcoin has made inroads into finance, energy, and even politics. Now, a growing number of healthcare companies are embracing it. Not only as a hedge or a balance sheet asset, but also as a guiding philosophy and potential infrastructure layer. The move may seem unlikely, given healthcare's deeply regulated and bureaucratic nature. But that's precisely the point. For companies like CrowdHealth and Semler Scientific, Bitcoin's appeal isn't speculative. It's structural. In a sector inundated with reverse incentives, opaque pricing, and costly middlemen, Bitcoin offers transparency. The U.S. healthcare system is worth roughly $5 trillion, averaging over $17,000 per person. Even with the high costs associated with health insurance, claims are often denied. Andy Schoonover, founder and CEO of CrowdHealth, experienced this firsthand. His insurer refused to pay an $8,000 bill for his daughter's ear tube surgery, despite doctors deeming it medically necessary. Soon after, he dropped his insurance and began building a cash-pay model that eventually became CrowdHealth. A peer-to-peer platform where members fund one another's healthcare needs. In this process, he found a natural audience among bitcoiners. Schoonover, who told Forbes in an interview he holds roughly 80% of his liquid assets in Bitcoin, says the overlap wasn't accidental. 'Bitcoiners understand incentives,' he said. Schoonover believes that as patients dig deeper into the healthcare system, it becomes clear that hospitals, health networks, and government policies often work against patients' best interests. A pattern quickly recognized by bitcoiners. CrowdHealth allows members to pay a monthly fee, directly contributing to each other's care. In return, they avoid premiums and networks. Schoonover said their model has grown to over 10,000 members. CrowdHealth is leaning further into Bitcoin by letting users invest unused healthcare funds into bitcoin. The long-term vision, according to Schoonover, is Bitcoin circularity in healthcare. 'If we can build bitcoin circularity within healthcare we believe that will go a long way in normalizing bitcoin as a medium of exchange,' Schoonover said. Unlike insurance, CrowdHealth doesn't guarantee payment. However, Schoonover claims that the community fully funds over 99% of eligible bills. While CrowdHealth integrates Bitcoin at the user level, Semler Scientific takes a top-down approach. The publicly traded medtech company adopted Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset in 2024, becoming one of the first healthcare companies to do so. For Semler chairman Eric Semler, Bitcoin represents resilience, scarcity, and alignment, traits sorely lacking in the healthcare system. 'Bitcoin is monetary freedom,' Semler told Forbes. 'We're freeing people medically through early detection, and Bitcoin helps us stay strong financially.' The company's core product, QuantaFlo, is an FDA-cleared diagnostic tool for vascular disease. It enables early detection of cardiovascular issues, allowing for timely and potentially life-saving interventions. Semler emphasized the importance of early detection and noted that healthcare could benefit from adopting principles found in Bitcoin's design, such as decentralization, transparency, and reducing reliance on middlemen. In an interview with Forbes, Eric Semler of Semler Scientific explained that their Bitcoin strategy isn't just about protecting cash in an inflationary environment. It's about owning the digital future. The company is exploring ways to mine Bitcoin creatively and integrate value into its shareholder model. 'We're in acceleration mode,' Semler said. 'We're not just buying Bitcoin, we're adding value to our value.' In 2023, Semler became active in the company his father had founded. He joined the board to improve capital allocation and saw Bitcoin as the obvious next step, following Michael Saylor's Strategy concept. 'It was a last resort in the best way.' Bitcoin offered a neutral reserve asset with no counterparty exposure or political entanglements, making it a good fit. Despite its early-mover status, Semler Scientific remains a rarity. Semler said that few medtech or biotech peers have followed suit. One exception is KindlyMD, a company that shares philosophical alignment but little market overlap. Still, he believes healthcare is well-positioned to lead a treasury shift. Healthcare companies generate steady cash flow, operate under strict regulations, and require long-term resilience, which according to Semler, makes Bitcoin a natural fit. That shift may be slow, but for now, Semler is content leading the charge. The future of Bitcoin in healthcare, according to companies like CrowdHealth and Semler Scientific, is not about layering crypto onto a broken system. It is about rebuilding that system from the ground up using first principles. They see Bitcoin with the potential to help make healthcare more affordable, build trust by putting patients in control, protect savings from inflation, and support better systems for sharing medical information. Schoonover envisions a future where bitcoiners fund one another's procedures and doctors accept bitcoin directly, cutting out insurers entirely. Semler imagines a more robust, future-proof treasury model that gives healthcare companies stronger balance sheets and global leverage. Bitcoin won't eliminate the need for regulation, nor will it immediately replace legacy players. But it does offer some interesting options. The examples of CrowdHealth and Semler Scientific suggest that some healthcare companies are exploring Bitcoin not for its popularity, but as a response to challenges in the current system.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The People Quitting Health Insurance For An Alternative Idea
Credit - Photo-Illustration by Chloe Dowling for TIME (Source Images: MyImages_Micha/Getty Images, C.J. Burton—Getty Images, Floortje/Getty Images, EyeEm, Tess Trunk—Getty Images, Muhammad Usman via Canva) When Geoff Perlman's 20-year-old son broke his arm in December 2022, the bill was paid by strangers who chipped in to cover the costs. And rather than paying a monthly premium to a health care company, Perlman writes a check each month, never exceeding $420 for his family of four, to foot strangers' health care bills, covering part of a pregnancy for one family or chemotherapy for another. Perlman, a 61-year-old tech CEO from Austin, Texas, is a member of 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. Perlman likes the company because he says it sidesteps insurers' incentive to deny claims and seek profit, while erasing patients' ignorance about what health care actually costs. 'You have a feeling you're part of a community and you're looking out for them,' says Perlman. 'It feels like the money I am paying is helping other people.' CrowdHealth, which was founded in 2021, offers a new take on an old idea. For decades, religious health-sharing ministries with names like Medi-Share and Samaritan Ministries have asked communities to pitch in for the medical bills of strangers. CrowdHealth has no spiritual affiliation; it's a peer-to-peer financial-technology company that allows its roughly 10,000 paying members to make payments toward fellow members' medical expenses. To join, members pay an administrative fee of about $55 a month. Each month, they get a message from CrowdHealth informing them that another member needs financial assistance for a specific medical issue. Members can agree to pay their share of the bill, which doesn't exceed $140 per month for a single person under 55, or $420 for a family of four. Or they can decline—at the cost of eroding their rating on CrowdHealth's site, making it less likely that fellow members will contribute to their own needs. Read More: Why Some Food Additives Banned in Europe Are Still on U.S. Shelves. When a member has a health care expense, they're instructed to pay in cash, or tell a hospital that they are a self-pay customer, save the receipts, and submit them to CrowdHealth for compensation. (CrowdHealth sometimes negotiates the price of planned labs or procedures ahead of time.) The company says it covers 99.8% of claims, though it does not specify what exactly is counted in that statistic. What draws people to CrowdHealth is deep discontent with the U.S. health insurance system. The share of Americans who said that the quality of health care in the U.S. is excellent or good—44%—is the lowest since at least 2001, according to a December Gallup poll. Even many of those with good insurance coverage are frustrated at the system's perverse incentives, byzantine regulations, and opaque processes. It's this frustration, in part, that led to a groundswell of public support for Luigi Mangione, who was charged with first-degree murder in December for allegedly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan. (Mangione has pleaded not guilty.) 'There's certainly a growing voice of people saying, 'What do we need health insurance for if it's just denying care?'' says Michelle Long, senior policy manager at KFF, a health care research group. Read More: For Many of America's Aging Workers, 'Retirement Is a Distant Dream' For better or worse, CrowdHealth is not health insurance, and there are caveats to the coverage it will provide. CrowdHealth won't pay for procedures related to preexisting conditions, including pregnancy, until you have been a member for nine months. They won't accept smokers, heavier individuals, or anyone age 65 and over. It doesn't cover long-term prescription or fertility treatment. And the company expects members to spend time on the phone with medical providers negotiating a cash price, as well as sometimes putting money up front to pay the bill before waiting for reimbursement. There is no guarantee that CrowdHealth will pay for your medical procedures. Still, for some people, the idea of health-care sharing is more appealing than dealing with insurance companies. 'What resonates with people is that they're just tired of health insurance. They're tired of these bills and these claims getting denied,' says Andy Schoonover, the CEO and founder of CrowdHealth. Schoonover says his own frustrations with health insurance motivated him to create CrowdHealth. After he sold a company and lost his employer-sponsored health insurance, he went on the health care marketplace and purchased insurance for himself, his wife, and two children, paying about $1,200 per month. Like many Americans, Schoonover had a plan through the Affordable Care Act, which dramatically expanded access to health care in America. But many consumers have reported problems getting claims approved through these plans. Nationwide, about 20% of claims through insurers were denied in 2023, according to a KFF analysis. Schoonover says that his insurer refused to pay $8,000 for ear tubes to treat his one-year-old's recurring ear infections—a treatment doctors said was medically necessary, but the insurer said was not. So Schoonover started thinking about alternatives. 'I said to them, 'Look, if you're not willing to pay my bills, I won't pay your bill,'' he recalls. He dropped his insurance, started to pay cash for procedures, and began looking at better ways to cover health care bills without insurance. Schoonover says he was surprised how much money he could save by offering to pay cash rather than offering up his insurance card, since he spared doctor's offices administrative costs. But that still left the question of how to cover the crushing fees of a major health problem like cancer. That's where the idea of CrowdHealth came in. 'My next thought was, 'If I could get a group of people willing to go the same route as me, then there could be others out there to help me in the case of a large medical event,' he says. Read More: How Doctors Are Pushing Medical Credit Cards on Patients Schoonover took to dozens of podcasts—many of which focused on Bitcoin or cryptocurrency—to promote CrowdHealth, in search of an audience already thinking of alternatives to current systems. One of them was Kyle Ward, now 33, who had gone without health insurance for 10 years after realizing that he wasn't using his employer-sponsored health insurance yet was paying hundreds of dollars a month for coverage. Ward had weighed the pros and cons of going without health care, and when the Affordable Care Act came out, he and his wife thought about signing up for a plan. But on his $44,000 per year salary, a premium of $300 per month plus a $7,000 deductible didn't seem worth the money, he says. He and his wife decided it was a better financial decision to invest the money they would otherwise spend on health insurance and just pay cash for health expenses. Doing so led to significant discounts, according to Ward, who says a doctor's visit near where he lives in rural Texas was $80 if he paid cash, while his wife's asthma medication was about $280 every three months. A gallbladder surgery that he had been told would cost $34,000 through insurance went down to $8,000 when he offered to pay cash, Ward says. Childbirth was $6,000 through a midwife who took cash. But Ward was still worried about catastrophic health events. So when he heard about CrowdHealth, he decided to sign up. It wasn't a perfect solution. Ward has a preexisting condition that requires frequent colonoscopies, and he knew that CrowdHealth would not cover those. But CrowdHealth helped him find a place willing to do the procedure for $950 cash, he says, and he figured that CrowdHealth was still worth it. 'Traditional health insurance is not working,' he says. 'Maybe I've bought into the sales pitch, but CrowdHealth makes sense to me financially and morally—and it really feels like they want to do good.' Read More: Why You Can't Find a Pediatrician. CrowdHealth appears to be popular with users—on the website Trustpilot, it received 4.8 stars out of 5, with 411 reviews. But it won't be the right solution for many families. It is not regulated like health insurance, and so if your claim is denied, there's no regulator to turn to. Caroline Niziol was a member of Medi-Share, one of the largest religious health-sharing ministries, from 2015 to 2017. It saved Niziol's family a lot of money: Medi-share cost them around $350 per month, while their traditional health insurance premium was around $850. But the ministry did not cover vaccines, physical therapy, or mental health care, and had an annual household ceiling for medical costs. When her husband had a procedure related to a chronic health condition that cost $10,000, Medi-Share refused to cover it, Niziol says, even though she believes they should have. Niziol says she had to argue with Medi-Share for months to get it covered, as she did when her newborn baby ended up in the emergency room. 'I kind of feel like you get what you pay for,' she says. "It can really be a time suck.' Medi-Share, which has 336,000 individual members, said in a statement to TIME that 80% of all bills are processed in 30 days or less. Member-voted guidelines govern what is and is not eligible for sharing, the company says, and these guidelines stipulate that there is no annual or lifetime limit on eligible medical bills. Medi-Share also says that physical therapy is eligible for sharing for up to 20 visits combined, and short-term counseling services are available by phone through Medi-Share's telebehavioral health service. CrowdHealth is small relative to religious health care sharing ministries; the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries counts nearly 700,000 members. The unregulated nature of these health-sharing companies has drawn attention from some states. In 2022, Colorado passed a law that requires health-sharing ministries and medical cost-sharing communities to report specific information to the commissioner of insurance regarding financial operations, membership, and medical bills submitted, paid, and denied in the state. It also required these communities to provide certain disclosures to members and respond to requests for payment of medical expenses without a specific period of time. Susan Lontine, the former Democratic legislator who sponsored the bill, says she introduced it because some Colorado residents had thought their health care expenses would be covered by these ministries and were surprised to find out they were not. 'We were just trying to get a handle on who these entities were,' Lontine says. The Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries sued the Colorado Division of Insurance over the law in May 2024, arguing that it deprives their members the right to exercise their religious liberty in the health care system. In the lawsuit, the alliance says that 33 states have enacted safe harbor laws clarifying that health care sharing ministries are exempt from the state insurance code. Four additional states have allowed them to operate exempt from the insurance code by providing members exemptions from state health insurance mandates. Read More: Why Your Pharmacy Experience is Miserable. Health care experts say that people should thoroughly research their options before signing up for health sharing. Many people might qualify for free or low-cost plans through the Affordable Care Act; research by KFF suggests that about 5 million people who didn't have insurance in 2023 could have gotten a plan through the ACA that was essentially free due to available subsidies. Experts also caution that people should think twice about giving up on health insurance because they're healthy and they think they will continue to stay that way. 'You just can't anticipate everything that will happen,' says Long of KFF. For some people, though, having an alternative to traditional health insurance is revolutionary enough. Geoff Perlman, the CrowdHealth member whose son broke his arm, says the cost savings alone are worth it to him. As a CEO of a tech company, Perlman knows a lot about the cost of health care. He offered UnitedHealthcare to his employees, and was on the plan for a while, paying about $2,000 per month in premiums for his family of four. He then switched to Liberty, a health-sharing ministry, in 2017, paying about $1,000 a month. When his wife got breast cancer in 2020, he says, Liberty paid every bill, even negotiating $1.2 million in total costs down to $217,000, which it paid. Then Liberty raised its prices, Perlman says, and he stumbled across CrowdHealth. His family of four now pays a membership fee of about $226 a month, plus anywhere from $185 to $386 per month for the medical bills of others. He says his payments have gone down by about one-third since he signed up in July 2022. Perlman is such a fan that although he offers all eight of his employees United Healthcare, he also offers an alternative: they can receive a stipend and make arrangements for themselves, either going onto and picking a plan there, or joining a health care ministry. Every single employee, he reports, has decided to take the stipend rather than sticking with employer-sponsored health insurance. Correction, March 20: The original version of this story misstated how long people have to be members of CrowdHealth in order to have procedures related to pregnancy covered. It is nine months, not two years. Contact us at letters@
CBS News
24-02-2025
- Health
- CBS News
Utah girl gifted life-changing bionic arm from stranger pays it forward to other kids in need
Remi Bateman was born without her left forearm and hand but she doesn't let it slow her down. Now 9 years old, Bateman is busy riding her bike and scooter around her neighborhood in Utah – and she's got her sights set on doing even more daily tasks, like cutting her own food and doing her own hair. Remi has been using a silicone prosthesis, covered by her health insurance, since she was 6 months old. While the prosthetic is helpful, it's heavy and doesn't give her the ability to move fingers. "Her current prosthetic is pretty stationary and doesn't do a lot," her mother, Jami, told "CBS Mornings." The hand on Remi's prosthesis was molded into a plastic fist. A "life changing" mission Last year, Jami came across a social media post for Open Bionics and its 3D-printed multi-grip "Hero Arm." Each finger has its own motor, making it possible to grip everyday items with precision. Within 48 hours, Jami and her husband, Josh, scheduled a video consultation with Open Bionics and drove to their clinic in Denver, Colorado for an initial fitting. "It was life changing," Jami said. "This bionic arm is like 95 percent of having a real hand." The Batemans hoped insurance would help pay for the Hero Arm but their provider denied coverage, saying it wasn't "medically necessary," according to Jami. Without insurance, the bionic arm cost $24,000. "I do understand that you can live just fine without [a hand], but imagine what you could do with two hands. I feel like the whole world is built around having two hands," Jami said. Like many Americans with medical needs not covered by insurance, the Batemans turned to crowdsourcing. On Dec. 10, 2024, Remi's fight for her Hero Arm made the local news. Within four days, the Batemans raised over $24,000. Andy Schoonover, CEO of CrowdHealth, a subscriber-based crowdfunding platform for medical bills, also contacted the Batemans after seeing their plea for help online. "He told me he would pay for Remi's hand in cash," said Jami. And that's where the story takes a turn. Paying it forward With Schoonover's gift, Jami realized they still had $24,000 in donations. She asked her daughter what she wanted to do with it. "Help more kids," Remi enthusiastically replied. "So people can actually have a life-changing arm like me." Across the country in Maryland, 9-year-old Tyraun "Taj" Johnson was also trying to raise money for a Hero Arm. He was born with a partial left hand. His family worked hand specialists at Johns Hopkins Medicine to look at surgery and different prosthesis options to give him some usage of his left hand. They were hopeful the Hero Arm could be the solution they were searching for. But like Remi, Taj's health insurance company denied the coverage of the Hero Arm. His family was devastated. "You're telling me that a kid able to function with daily tasks – something as small as feeding themselves, getting telling me that that's not medically necessary?" his mother, Kaitlin Skinner, asked. "I would give Taj my left hand if I could," Kaitlin added. The family started lemonade stands to raise the money for the bionic arm. In four months, they had only made $1,500. Then they got a life-changing call from Remi's mom. The Bateman's offered to use the donations they received for Remi's arm for Taj's Hero Arm. Open Bionics helped connect the families. Samantha Payne, co-founder of Open Bionics, told CBS News clinicians spend a lot of time assisting families in appealing insurance denials. "The technology is 20 years old and has been tested," added Payne. A dream come true Kaitlin was brought to tears by the Batemans' generous offer and thanked them for making Taj's dream come true. "Taj got teary eyed when he saw a video of Remi holding a fork with the Hero Arm," Kaitlin said. One of the things Taj is most looking forward to is playing sports. Kaitlin recently drove to New York City with Taj to meet Daniel Green, upper limb prosthetist at Open Bionics, who will make the mold that will become Taj's Hero Arm. While in New York, Taj had a surprise visitor: Remi and her mom. They arrived at our invitation. A new friendship forged through the kindness of strangers. Remi and Taj plan to meet again during the summer. "If we have a playdate with our [Hero] robot arms, we could be like Ironman," Remi said. Donations for Remi continued to pour in. So she's continued to pay it forward, using the fund to help two more 11 year olds fund their Hero Arms after insurance denied their claims.
