How To Fix Modern Health Care | Andy Schoonover

diabetes is up from 1% in 1970 to now 10 10x over the last 50 years which is just crazy and the vast majority of that if not almost all of that is type two 40% of Americans are pre-diabetic so ostensibly within a decade you could have 50% of the population of the United States jez fully diabetic what the hell is that going to do to the healthcare cost Dr Robert lustig estimated that $46 trillion we spend a year on Healthcare he estimated that we spend about 2.4 TR million of those dollars just treating the effects of sugar consumption alone just sugar consumption oh that doesn't shock me I know it's a trillion on Diabetes patients directly it doesn't shock me there would be another 1.4 on other sugar related metabolic health concerns welcome to the plant-free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chaffy where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically hello everyone thank you for joining me for another episode of the plant-free MD I'm your host Dr Anthony chaffy today I have a very special guest Andy schoonover who has very interesting story to tell he's been in medical uh the medical industry for quite some time and has decided to sort of buck the system and go out in a very different direction which I think will be very interesting for everyone to hear Andy thank you so much uh for coming on and thank you for having me it's an honor to be here not a problem so you've been in in the healthcare industry for quite a while and now you've going a very different direction can you can you tell us a bit about that and where you're at these days with your company yeah you know the uh First Healthcare company I I sold it uh a few years back and I told myself that I would never do it again you know Healthcare is just so so hard regulation and big insurance or insurance providers are you know primary customers and it's just a Big Cartel um and so I was like I'm going to sell this company I'm going to go and enjoy fishing and golf and eating you know tacos which is what I love to do here in Austin um and uh so I I I rolled off that company I thought I didn't have any other options than to go to the Affordable Care Act to the Obamacare plans and got that pay was paying 1,200 bucks for me my wife and my girls two girls and I kind of joke it worked until I had to use it my my little one who was having recurring year infections um and and I'm sure some parents out there who are listening to this can can this will will empathize um you know couldn't sleep at night couldn't you know was was cranky the entire time well we took her to the ears nose and throat Dock and he was like yeah she's got a basically a hole in her eardrum um so he have to go get tubes in her ear so we went to the only Hospital in town that was in network for this procedure went and got the procedure it was a 15minute procedure got the bill it was $8,000 for 15 minutes I was just like wow you know I I'd love that hourly rate right8 grand for 15 minutes and um and little did I know I was going to get uh another note in the bill or another note in the mail from my health insurance plan that was that said it was medically unnecessary and so they were not going to pay for it um I went through three rounds of appeals I think M year nose and throat doctor was talking to some like an optomologist or something like that at the health plan like they were going back and forth you know about my daughter's ear so it was kind of a funny funny thing but after the three rounds of appeals they're like we're not paying for it and so it was at that point I called him I said look you know if you're not going to pay my bills I'm not paying your bills so I quit that was about four years ago a little over four years ago and I have been living as I like to say delightfully uninsured ever since um and have built a company actually to allow people to operate outside of of you know what I what I think is kind of the tyranny of health insurance um and have a lot more more control and and freedom over their own their own Healthcare so the company's called crowd health and we've been around for about three years now um have had 7,000 people sign up and and what NE what we're doing is we're helping each other fund fund our healthc care expenses so it's a cool uh different way of doing this um and you it's just been a great experience so is this so what's the the system how you guys are doing this so is is it people sort of try to chip in and help or is this sort of like a a health care Savings Plan sort of thing yeah it's kind of in between so the the the mechanics of how it works is if you you sign up we start a bank account for you um and then if you get hurt which just say you break your arm and it's $5,000 you'll pay the first $500 of that and then we'll go out to 100 or 45 people in the crowd and ask them each for a 100 bucks to help Dr Anthony with his broken arm um they can say yes or they can say no if they say yes then $100 goes from their account to your account and ultimately at the end of the day you then have $4,500 in your account plus your 500 that you're paying to pay for your broken arm uh the beauty is is that you can pay for your broken arm in cash now um typically at the point of care and so doctors love that because they don't have to bill insurance and and I'm sure you've experienced this like it's a huge pain in the ass to to Bill insurance and so if you're willing to pay cash at the point of care doctors are willing to give you a significant discount um and in fact we're getting our members about a 50% discount versus what the health plans are paying for the same same procedures and services so um that's where all the savings is coming from is just enabling people to pay cash at the point of care um and you know doctors love it yeah well I I I would imagine I mean that's the whole idea I mean people hear me harp on about you know Professor Thomas soul but I mean he he talks about these the sort of limitations in the systems and you know third party payers you have like a government sort of system where the government's neither accept receiving the care nor you know responsible for the money like it's not their money and and so you end up getting the worst of Both Worlds and then insurance companies would be a second payer they're worried about keeping costs down they're not all that worried about you getting the best health care necessarily you know unless it get gets to the point that people okay we'll just screw that insurance base we'll go somewhere else and then of course you mentioned like you know the tyranny of the insurance company system Insurance system I mean there is one I mean you can't you can't compete cross state lines with insurance companies that was one of the things uh I spoke to people that were actually involved in in the policymaking decisions during the the Obamacare Act actually a guy who's in my uh class in medical school is actually partially involved in that and into in a small role but when when they were trying to put that through the Obamacare sort of through they were getting obviously a lot of push back from the from the lobbyists and the insurance companies and he basically said listen you guys should back me on this because the other alternative is is to open up open up the state lines and let everybody compete so you know if you come with me you'll probably do better and if we do that and just a free market actually just drops the price is down and they oh okay all right we'll do that and they ended up losing out more on that I think yeah so um you know didn't didn't working out for them but it was you know it was that sort of cartel mindset you know they wanted to do what's what's best for them to you know create a false Monopoly um and Force Monopoly you which which uh you know has been said that you can't have without government intervention if you have a true free market system you can't have a monopoly even when Rock Feller yeah a lot of people in this space hate Rockefeller but you know just an interesting fact that when he actually had 92% of the market share for the oil prices were actually going down and they kept going down even though he had a monopoly but he didn't have a monopoly he was he was he had 92% of the market share because it actually was a free market and he was just providing a better product at a better price and then by the time they the the big trust busting uh surge went through America uh he only had something like 24% of the market but now he's this powerful Monopoly and has to has broken up and uh so it's just sort of funny in that in that regard but um that's fantastic I think so one of the things you said is I think you know Soul would basically say that what what we have in in healthcare is a principal agent problem um and in essence What's Happening Here is that the the agent which is our insurance plan um we are giving them the responsibility of going out and negotiating really good prices for for us at least that's the the idea right um we're we're supposed to be able to negotiate as a group big group of people against the the the other end of it which is typically Hospital systems but in essence what happened was is with Obamacare is is Obamacare legislated that the insurance plans could only make a 15% profit on the premiums so if you have $1,000 of premiums you can only make $150 so from the outside looking in it's a great idea they're like oh great you know insurance plans can't gouge the the public but the problem is that that then incentivizes the insurance plans to have premiums go up right so how do you grow your your profit by 10% well the premiums have to go up by 10 per. so what in essence what that did was the our agent wants the prices to go up the insurance plans they're the buyers of healthare the sellers of healthcare which is these big Hospital Systems they want the price to go up and so you have the buyer and the seller of healthcare both wanting the price to go up now um and so that's you know people ask me like oh this this Healthcare is so complex like why why is the price is so high I was like if you have the buyer and the seller of healthcare both wanting to go the prices go up then the price is go going up um you know and so there's no free market within within Healthcare and what we're trying to do is saying hey you as an individual actually have more negotiating power against the hospital than United Healthcare does I mean if you think about it you know United Healthcare is is often times NE negotiating even if they wanted to negotiate against duopolies or you know ooples in some of these cities I live in Austin Texas there are two Hospital Systems in Austin you have to have both of them in your network or else you're going to lose out in Austin um and so when United Healthcare if they wanted to come in and say I'm cutting your prices the hospital says system says okay bye you know and and United Healthcare was like okay well I'm totally out of the Austin Market um and and so you you get these you know oligopolies against the duopolies and just prices just you know rise and so we um as individuals can go in and say hey Doc how much is this actually going to cost can I negotiate with you and they will um you know 95% of the time if you ask for a cash price the cash price is 30 to 40% lower than what the health insurance plan will pay for so you actually are a better negotiator than the than United Healthcare which is a pretty pretty cool thing hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want a nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products there will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10% off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25% off total all right thanks guys yeah well that that's a very good point and and very you know good way of putting that as well because that that is what they say right well if you have a whole government and saying well we're gonna we're gonna negotiate better because we're such a big client we can get better prices but it actually isn't true and I've seen time and time again since I was in high school people would go in and say hey look I'm paying for this cash like how much would that cost and and I mean sometimes I've seen even more than 30 40% I've seen EAS 75% sometimes 50% is very typical and and and that's my good friend of mine you I grew up playing rugby with he actually went in he had had some stitches and things like that he needed to get he's like listen I don't have insurance I'm just paying for this by cash like how much would it be and they dropped the price down really low was like 75% off and he's like whoa really he's like yeah if you pay this cash right now it's you know we'll charge you 25% of what the cost is and he's like how does that work he said yeah a large a large portion of medical bills in America don't get paid and then you're like Medicare and and um you insurances they have to fight with these people for a long time to get paid and they were saying uh at least that person said to him at the time if everyone just paid their bills and we didn't have to sort of deal with insurance companies like this is how much we would have to charge to actually make the profit that we need on the hospital like wow right that's pretty impressive and so yeah it is it is worth their their while to do that also if you look at if you look at it's called like the road to success in medicine Road D so uh like radiologist orthopedic surgeon opthalmologist anesthesiologist dermatologist those are the Specialties to go into if you actually want to U you know have have a comfortable living as opposed to you know some of the other things I mean you're not you're not going to you're not going to go broke being a doctor but it is certainly not the Heyday for um making money in medicine anymore not by any stretch of the imagination and so those are those are typically those are typically Specialties where people still get get more money because a lot of the time they're getting paid cash for a service and so they can actually make more money and as a result of that a lot of their procedures which used to be extremely expensive like lasic eye surgery yeah is much cheaper you have applications of free market forces to that that first it was like $110,000 in eye and there's only a few people doing it wasn't that very good of quality but then more people said hold on I can get 10 grand for 15 minutes work like yes I I'll do that and so more and more people started doing it they had more and more procedures the technology got better people's experience got better now you can get well in America anyway you can get this for $1,000 an ie yeah or less and it's better quality you're doing with someone who's who's done 20,000 procedures and you know and and it costs next to nothing and that's and that's what happens where you you you contrast that with things that are you know Milton Freedman did a did a sort of an economic experiment where you just looked at you tried to find something that that wouldn't that wouldn't sort of change with technology obviously technology gets you know cheaper more expensive when it's newer so you can't really look at that but what about just the cost of being in a room over for one day just overnight in a hospital and looked at that from the beginning of the induction of Medicare until I think it was like you know the 1980s at some point when he did this and he calculated that was sort of like a 30-year period or something like that 20 30 year period whatever it was and he calculated out that the cost of just physically being in a room without any sort of treatment or anything like that went up by 22 100% since Medicare came in so it was actually making things more expensive and more costly as opposed to making things less costly like you're you're doing yeah perfect example of this I just put this on Twitter uh the other day I've you know one of the things with Obamacare was they forced health insurance plans to paper contraception and so there's this really interesting graph where it's the 10 years before insurance plan started paying for contraception and the 10 years after and so the 10 years before it was just chugg long you know 0% real and then literally the the the year that Obamacare went in act it went hockey sticked you know it went up by like 300% as soon as insurance plans you know started paying for it and so once you rip the free market out of of the the system prices go go Haywire right and so that's in reality what we're trying to do is bring free markets back to to healthcare and here's the the beautiful part of this right is I always say that um you work for whoever pays you and if the insurance companies are paying these doctors the doctors work for the insurance companies you know they they they want to work for you but in reality they're getting paid by the insurance companies and so they have to do what the insurance companies want them to do or else they're not getting paid um but if I pay my doctor the doctor now works for me right like I am his I am his customer and you are treated as such and it's amazing when you say go to the doctor and say hey I'm paying you what what the difference is and so I'll give you one quick example I was unfortunately at the cardiologist like six or nine months ago all is good but they had some tests they had to do I had to do a stress echo test I think it was and so I went and and the doctor's like hey I'm going to give you an order to go get a stress echo will you go do that I was like great um first off that stress echo cost me under 200 bucks um a guy on Twitter reached out to me and said he had a stress echo with an insurance plan it was like $5,000 um which was absolutely crazy but then the cardiologist said he's like look since you're paying for this um can I just call you on the phone normally I would have you come in you know because you could bill for it um I'd have you come in and we can go over the things but I'm just going to call you on the phone if that's okay I'm like hell yeah that's okay the last thing I want to do is come into a doctor's office and wait in a waiting room and do this all over again right and so um it's cool to see that the the doctor patient relationship you know is is without middlemen um when you're paying your doctor directly and it really does change the aim yeah absolutely and you know that I mean that again you know you have have these different sort of procedures or or or different sorts of Specialties that do largely cash based sort of payments and it makes things a perfect example of that too would be like plastic cosmetic surgery yes this is a cash based sort of system like Insurance isn't going to cover somebody who's having you know a cosmetic you nose job or something like that you know unless you had you know an accident or something like that that that um you know needs to be fixed for you know actual you know medical purposes uh if you're just saying I don't like the I don't like the hook on my nose I'm just going to change that you know it's not gonna it's not going to be covered obviously and so I mean your two your daughter's ear tubes weren't even covered like defitely not going to cover like a cosmetic surgery and so you know but these these prices go down now more and more people are getting into that because they can actually make money off of it instead of sort of fighting with insurance and and all these sorts of things I'll give you I'll give you good example of we should have a nose job index like let's look at the nose the cost of a no nose job yeah you know on a yearly basis I bet you it's pretty flat to actually going down in real terms it's probably going down whereas Healthcare generally is you know going up and almost like a parabolic you know curve um so it's it's amazing when you lasx you mentioned Lasix before too like lasx since 2001 2000 or 2001 has just gone plummeted from I think it was like six or $7,000 an eye to now under $1,000 an eye in some places yeah absolutely and you know I'll give you an example of some of this this strange stuff too and as as as far as like a doctor's concerned how how much of a pain this is to deal with people is because personal example this year I've been doing sort of you know private sort of work in in neurosurgery so I've been assisting other neurosurgeons and the private practices and things like that while I'm doing all my other things on the side so you know it's good way of making money on the side sort of Moonlighting and they have this system in Australia where you you have a medical license you're licens to practice then you have a medical registration number that's somehow different than your than your licensing number and then you have something called the provider number so every single different hospital or clinic that you work in you need to apply and it takes weeks and sometimes months if the even comes in time uh to get to get a new provider number so you you get accepted you're qualified you're licensed but you can't actually do anything there until you get this stupid number and you have to apply for every single thing the amount first of all the amount of bureaucratic paperwork and cost to you know the tax base is just insane you what you're adding to this and just completely unnecessary work and so I had a provider number for this hospital this private hospital and so I was I didn't think anything was wrong and so I was I was doing this work and and you know doing these you know help assisting these private surgeries and things like that and uh everything was fine everything was fine but then you know the the secretary was saying was like Hey you know having a bit of a you know issue sort of getting you paid and all this sort of stuff you know Medicare from the government isn't isn't just being a bit of a pain you know is that all right it's like yeah it's fine look it's not a big deal and after a few months of this they came back to me and said hey look we just spent you know or I just spent um you know the secretary spent like two hours on the phone trying to figure out like why the hell I wasn't getting paid finally got through to the right person he said oh well he has the wrong kind of provider number he has a provider number that allows him to work there allows him to make referrals allows him to request Imaging and studies and lab tests but not actually get paid it's like oh well that's good that's very useful you know so not only do I need a different provider number for each different bloody hospital I need a a different kind of provider number if I actually want to get paid it's like why would why would why would I not why would there be a provider number where you can't get paid what's the point of that ex yeah exactly you know it's just so stupid and the thing is too the insurance companies have a racket with this too because they know that the government they just make it as difficult as possible so that they don't have to pay you you know because they're the ones they are incentivized to not pay you and so they're they're incentivized to make this as hard as possible so that you can't get paid oh no what we don't back date you know if you don't have if you don't have a provider number this and the other no no no that was just free you're just doing volunteer work and the insurance companies are in on this racket too because even though they I'm on that all the documentation saying that I was in that surgery I did that I helped that surgery they won't pay unless Medicare pays and they know it's next to impossible to get those bastards to choke up a dollar so you know they're they're in good geez good standing because they they yep I know you did the surgery I know you did this and this and privately insured and you'd get 50 bucks from Medicare but yep no if you if they don't think you deserve to get paid we don't think you deserve to get paid it's complete another crap and so I think I need to talk to a lawyer but basically I lost out on six months work I haven't been yikes paid for that well now it's a perfect example why you know doctors don't want to get paid by a third party like it's just so much easier to get paid with cash at the point of care like you know you're getting paid and you don't need a provide crazy provider number to to to do it I mean the bureaucracy that that you see in in uh in in healthcare is is legit I mean I don't know if you've ever seen that uh that graph that's going around social media right now but it basically shows the growth of doctors versus the growth of Administrators over the last I think it's like 30 or 40 years or something like that and the growth in doctors is just a flatline whereas the growth in administrator again goes up into the right and it and it started off with like the amount of Administrators and doctors being the same and now it's like 30 or 40 times the amount of Administrators as there are actually doctors and people get are crazy by this but like we you know we spend about $4.6 trillion doll in the United States on Healthcare it would be the fourth largest GDP if it were a country you know behind China Japan the United States um and uh and and so you know only eight% of that actually goes to the doctors yeah so eight% of our total healthc care spend actually goes to the doctor you know the rest of it goes to backend Bureau ocratic administrative you there's some other practitioners there too but um you know a lot of that is just you know stuff that get ripped out of the system if you just PID with a credit card at the point of care and that's what we enable yeah well that's what I heard years ago like you know before I I went into medical school is that you know people were talking about how the you well the reason that medical expenditures was or costs were so high is because these damn doctors get paid too much and I saw I saw an economist at the time who who said basically what you're saying now which is if you if you didn't pay doctors one cent it wouldn't it wouldn't appreciably lower the cost of of health care at all right right and so I mean you think about that you get eight% off it's not even like a 10% oh yeah 10% off whatever it's not even that you know like a you know Friday special sort of thing for 10% off bring your friend and get 10% off or something like that it's like it's not even that so it's 10% is even wor but hardly worth it when you're going for the 10% off you know yeah the the ribey at the local Chili's like that's not even something that you're gonna you know bad an eye at yeah I was like 10% what the hell is that yeah and so you know I mean like your $88,000 procedure so you'd get $800 off there okay that's not nothing you know but it's like still you're paying $7,200 and and that's goes just to the hospital I saw this as well um well yeah thing is is the doctor is the face right you're you're going there to to see the doct obviously you're seeing the doctor and that PS for everything else right right so obviously he's not getting that and you know people are I remember talking to them about uh different chemotherapy agents and how they be like you know $60,000 a month for this and they're like oh my god well look at that you know that guy must be you know just in a mansion and this and the other like he the doctor doesn't get paid that like doctor's not getting paid that that's a pharmaceutical you know yeah exactly and of the cartel that's getting paid for that crazy amount yeah exactly so you know it but we you you see that you know face man is is the doctor so that and and you see the bill and you associate that bill with that face like that's son of a you know so yeah yeah 8% I didn't know that that particular figure but that's good to to know exactly what that is it's it's funny and well here in the US too like from from what I've seen the stats is uh each doctor has about three billion people per doctor to make them to allow them to bill right so yeah and they they have the billing system that they have to go through the EMR EHR whatever it is that they're billing usually takes like somewhere between 3 and 5% sometimes 6% of the revenue off the top and so you start getting all these middlemen all these rent Seekers um who are trying to take a piece of the action and by the end of the game it's not the doctors it's just the administration bureaucratic BS that that that sucks up most of the cost um so we just need to rip that out of the system yeah well there there's a lot of that in many other Industries education industry uh others administrative bloat you know I mean we're increasing the cost of of uh you know education budget and that does not go to teachers that largely goes to administrative bloat because in a lot of states the administrators anybody working for the school system is required to be in the school Lobby or the school um Union and and like you said you know if if the insurance companies only get paid 15% of of their premiums obviously they want pre premiums to go up same thing with the with the you know education um Union is that they get paid for union dues and so they need headcount and so they don't necessarily care if you know Joe Schmo teacher um Jane schain more there um who you know they don't care if they get paid more money you know they just they just want them to be quiet enough that they keep you know keep in line and keep paying Ed they want more numbers they want more headcounts so in a lot of school districts and and Thomas Sol writes about this and and shows the numbers but they have entire building they build an entire multi-million dollar building just to house Superfluous administrative staff and secretaries that just sit there I've heard this I've been to one of them they were so bored that like literally like six people just jumped up and like hey can I help you oh yeah it's great yeah because they were just sitting there oh my gosh you know and and that's our tax going to work which is just Preposterous I mean and you think of that like the small fractional percentage because I mean you know it's not like these people are paying even eight% of their salary you know uh to the the union I mean they're paying you know a few hundred bucks yeah may like and so it's like they just want this mass number so they can get more money it is such a bizarre system but they think of this as a business you know it's just like well we need to increase our revenue and this is how we get revenue and so that's what they have to do it doesn't matter how much cost it is for other people it doesn't matter how much harm it it causes to other people I'll give a good example of sort of the the wasteful spending that we see here in in the public system and now people in America who want a public health care System think about the VA system how good is that I don't I don't think I've ever met anybody who said yeah the VA system that's great let's nationalize that but that's that's what it is you know and we spend more on the VA system far more we spend about 10 times more per full-time patient in the VA system than we do for the national average right we spend nearly $100,000 per full-time patient because not everybody's a full-time patient in the VA most people if they can afford it go elsewhere but full per full-time patient they pay about $100,000 per person per year and the national average in America at least last I checked was like $9,600 it might be over $10,000 now but that's it's around 10 times the amount of money and it sucks it's even worse and that's because the system is worse you know if you want to go from New York to to England and you're in a rowo and you have two ores and you say Okay ores make this go faster if I add more Ores this will just go even faster so I'll add 500 ores and that'll make it go faster and it's like no that's a dumb system like the more you spend on that the worse it's going to be now you're going to sink the dinghy and that's what happen with the VA system that it was horrible wait times people weren't satisfied people were committing suicide because they were waiting so long to see doctors and so they said okay well we have and and they tried to cover it up too that's the other reason why you don't want these people involved because they're you can't let the referees be involved in the game because they're they're always going to win and so they got called out on this they tried to cover it up it got uncovered and so they said okay well we'll we'll increase the budget they increased the va's budget by 50% and the weight times increased they got worse because like the dinghy and the robo analogy there it's just a bad system it's inefficient a buddy of mine uh worked for Striker and he would um at the time he was revamping or just making entire new operating rooms and I mean multi-million dollar contracts putting all this state-of-the-art equipment in and he went into a VA hospital and the U the the hospital manager there was just like yeah we just did this contract with this other company spent $18 million brand new operating rooms all Suite of operating rooms and I'm just not happy with it I want you to gut it out and put all new Striker stuff in with it and he was like okay so that was another $24 million and he said what what do you want us to do with the equipment you know do you want to sell it you want to do this just get rid of it $18 million worth of equipment she just said just get rid of it it's not her money she doesn't give a you know yeah so just like yeah whatever ever just get rid of it and so that you you see that sort of that sort of waste so in in my field in neurosurgery here in Australia so they have a bit of a mixed picture you know the hospitals are incentivized to actually get people home and have good outcomes UN likee in Europe where just you have a budget at the beginning of the year and that's it and all the patients are just the enemy and you want you want to deal with as little few patients as possible because you don't want to spend this this precious horde that you have and so here you are actually incentivized to get people home on time it's not a it's not a a great system but it's at least at least has some sort of uh incentive models in the right direction but for non-emergency patients where someone's not dying or about to lose a limb it's it's pretty backwards so the the government doesn't wants to pay as little as possible so they they put a lot of roadblocks in the way so they make it very difficult for us to see see non-emergency patients and so at the moment in nurse surgery if you're a category 3 non-emergency not life or Li threatening sort of condition um it's right now 4 and a half year waiting period just to get a firsttime appointment oh for God's sakes yeah four and a half years and so then when you get seen it's it's not like you're going to get surgery that week you know you probably will get another MRI because your MRI is two years stale at this point or three or four years stale at this point you have to try conservative methods try different sorts of things you know different sort of approaches and then this may take months or a year and then you know to work this properly up because you're never seeing somebody you know earlier than three-month intervals and you're not going to get an MRI before three months unless it's like an emergency and so you're just you're just things are just stalling out stalling out and then eventually you say okay yeah well we've done everything that we need to do to work this up you qualify for surgery we'll put you on the waiting list category three is going to be a year or two before you get surgery so real real weight times from seeing your doctor and getting referred to a neurosurgeon to when you're actually getting surgery could be easily five to six years normally right and so you know some of these people surpris people aren't dead by then well you know the thing is is that that's that's the thing like if if it is more more urgent like actually the the emergency system here actually works pretty well actually you can do something if someone has like a tumor like in Ireland it was like even if you tumor or something like that it was a mandatory toye wait to get in to see a specialist of any description mandatory minimum two-year weight and so obviously that doesn't work too well if you have a if you have a new presentation of a brain tumor um here it's different you know you actually can get you know you go in you get they'll see like okay this person's not doing so well clinically they might have a space occupying lesion you get a CT like oh that's not good things happen very quickly so that is actually very the emergency service is very good here it's the non-emergency service that is very bad and so the um a category three would be something it's just like pain could be debilitating extreme pain where they can't get up they can't walk they can't work they can't do anything but their leg still works and they're not going to die right you know it's just it's just extreme pain but a lot of these people don't work because they're in so much pain they can't work you have pain you know pinch nerve shooting down their leg or their arm they can't function and they're on just handfuls of medications every day that has a cost and you're doing that for five years six years like how much is the cost of all that medication but also these people are not working the taxes here are onerous to say the least and so you know you typically you know you can well you can spend easily you know 40 50% of your your your salary on on income tax right and so the the government's losing out on that you it makes no sense the government's trying to trying to save money by pushing this stuff off just kicking it down the road kicking it down the road not giving us the resources to do surgery and and see patients and so they're they're making this delay another four five six years before they get treated and they're not getting paid that whole time so you you have these people that are that are not working the whole time so suffering they're in pain the whole time so obviously that's not what you want to do but also they're not working so they're losing out on all of their income they're not boarding their career they're not getting promotions and raises and all that sort of stuff and the government's you know not getting their you know their protection money out of that and getting their 40% and um and and this is and then they're also paying disability on top of that right and this is all to avoid paying if you paid cash $12,000 operation right and so you know someone's making I mean this is what Thomas Sol points out you know with with the Health Care Systems and the government healthare systems because of the delays it's like what is your time Worth right so five years I mean if you're if you're and this is from the patient perspective as well it's just like can you not figure out how to get 12 Grand like take a loan do something so that you can get back to where I can't afford to do that you can't afford not to do that when I explain that to patients they get it right when I explain that to other doctors they sometimes get it they often don't get it they're like well this is the system and they should do it okay yes that's fine that's the system they shouldn't have to pay because they pay taxes but the system sucks and this is the system and this is what this is the reality of it and if you want to sit there and be in paying for 10 years or five years you know that's your business but if you want to get back if you want your patient to get back to work you well they can't afford to do that I'm like really it sounds like they can't afford not to do that your patient's making $150,000 a year and you're saying he can't afford a $122,000 operation that we get him back to work five years early um I'm pretty sure that that's exactly what he needs to do he can't afford to wait really and so that's the thing you know if you unless you make less than $2,000 a year then just paying the 12 Grand is actually worth it right from an economics right and but people don't really see that and they don't really understand that it makes such a massive difference to their lives to just pay for what they're doing and if you had that the entire system then you know like you're talking about you know you know doctors would be happier because they'd actually be getting paid you don't have to deal with Medicare and Medicaid in the US which you can take nine months to over a year just to get paid so you have to have paid you have to be you have to be able to float your entire practice which is a business you know you got to float your entire business and your company for a year or more sometimes times just to get paid you know and it's going to be better for the patients as well because they're not going to have to pay as much and so now you're not paying all this administrative bloat and middlemen and everything like that to gouge prices and gouge rates and and work in the system somehow they get restricted this way okay it's just going to pressure pressure moves where pressure goes right so if you start putting pressure here it's just going to squirt around the side you know they're going to look for something what you need to do is open it up so there's no pressure and people just get to interact normally and able to compete in in a traditional fashion I never understand the people who um advocate for the a full public system but um there are and it sounds it's mostly people who've never experienced a full public system um to see the downsides of that they only see the lower lower cost but the lower cost comes with the cost with an actual cost um you know and they look at our system they say oh well look you know United States is twice as expensive as everybody else and and look at uh the outcomes the outcomes are even worse because our you know life expectancy is going down and things like that and then I think what people really miss is like well look you know the the obesity rate in the United States is twice other you know economically developed and so you're not going to get the same results with a ACL tear with somebody who's you know 350 pounds as you would with somebody who's 175 pounds right um and so the the the unfortunately the the the results of some of these are not as good if you're looking at it just kind of purely in in a without an adjustment for o obesity and so I think there's an issue there too that I know that you talk about a lot you know just in terms of you know what we eat and the nutrition and things like that but from my perspective and you may I hope you I think you agree with me on this is is Doctors Don't typically get trained on on that part of of the bit you know Healthcare in in medical school right there's not a lot of nutrition in medical school and I'd almost argue that's probably good because I'm not sure they would get the right the right training anyway um you know and so you know it's just it's such a screwed up system in in so many ways and that's why it's like nutrition health care I these things are so intertwined I think the monetary system is intertwined too um just because you know we don't have to really pay attention to the cost of things if we have a monetary system where we're just going to print money and print money print money and print money um and not have to like own it um you know and so you know it's all three of these things I think are the the trifecta of um you know the the fall of the American Empire here you know my guesses over the next decade or two yeah well I mean I certainly hope not you know I mean that's something that that so and other people have been warning about you know that there there is a point of no return and you know people can write the ship and do these sorts of things but eventually things things go down and you know there was a fall of Rome you know and and ancient Athens and and the other sort of fleeting bright spots of Freedom that people have they've all come down at some point yeah you know and unfortunately it's it's you know about you know 50 years over after they deeg their their currency from an underlying asset and we now 50 years after being deeg from the underlying asset so you know I I don't I don't see how what the current deficits the United States is going to have to be able to come back from it um you know we're running trillion dollar deficits right now and so you know what are you going to take away from people to make up for that trillion dollars the problem with government you know spending and so says this is once you give something to somebody it's hard to take it away you know perfect example is in covid they had this special um subsidization of Obamacare plans but I think they went up to 400% of the federal power level or something where they would fully subsidize these plans well that was supposed to be a one-time thing because people were struggling during covid well guess what they extended it last year for another three years um and you know now two years from now or one year in two years from now are politicians really going to be able to say you know what we're not doing that anymore we're not subsidizing you and everybody's health care costs go up they're gonna be like no they're going to say of course we we love the people you know we love the people we want them to you know get free health care so we're going to continue subsidization I think it's $100 billion doar a year or something like that which is kind of nothing in the grand scheme of things in the United States uh economy it seems like but um those are the types of things where once you give it you can't take it away and we are set up in a system where as soon as you know the population understands that they can you know vote people into office who are just going to give them stuff then that's when you start seeing the decline and I think we're you know unfortunately past the point of no return on some of this stuff because I just don't see anybody pulling back some of these you know entitlements and other things that are going to be required and I think healthc care is you know a huge huge part of that um because everybody thinks Healthcare is a right um and and maybe it is I don't know that's I'm not I'm not versed enough in kind of rights to to argue one way or the other but um it sure is Hell really really expensive in taking a massive chunk out of the US you know budget so much so that I think it's going to end up putting us into a really really difficult situation the next decade or two yeah well I think a good a good explanation of uh you know of of Rights is that you know something can't be a right if it causes an obligation in someone else you know so it's like if um if if you have a right to health care that means that I have an obligation to to as a doctor to serve you for free and so that turns my labor that takes away my labor and takes away my freedom you can't have that you know so that's um you know that that's doesn't really work but right to Liberty right to Freedom a like a right to the pursuit of happiness mean meaning that you get to strive to be happy no one owes you happiness because that means different things to different people and doesn't wouldn't be able to provide that for people right um but be bifurcated that though right we bifurcated the the the benefits that we get from having to actually pay for it and so what happens is that if we don't directly pay for something then we're going to try to you know extract as much value out of the system as as possible um you know it would be it would be an interesting you know experiment to say Hey listen yes we can go spend you know uh a hundred billion dollars uh fighting this war in Ukraine I'm not making a political statement about the war in Ukraine I'm just making it as an example but okay United States are is everybody in the United States willing to pay you know ,000 dollar or whatever to make that happen I bet you a lot more people would probably say no I don't want to do that you know because right now we don't really feel it right because all we do is just put it on debt and we kick the can down the road and so that's really easy to do it's a really easy decision to make when we don't actually have to pay for it um if we actually have to pay for it then I think a lot of people would be like I'm not putting in a thousand bucks to to fight this war right or I'm not putting $ thousand dollar in for all these people who were did have to pay for health care now getting healthcare for free and I have to pay for it um and so once you take those two things apart the benefit and you know paying for it things just break right and that's what's happening with our economy it's what's happening with with Healthcare look in healthcare we pay our premium every month generally if you're in with insurance but um so so when you get hurt you're like you think that the system is screwing you we all think health insurance sucks and so we think you know we're getting screwed we have to fight with the insurance company but when we get the opportunity to go and and and actually extract value out of they're like ah finally all these years that I'm paying for health insurance I actually get to use it and so now I'm going to suck as much value out of the system as possible and that just sends the system into a death spiral I mean what if you were in a group let's let's put this out there for a minute like what if you were in a group of just carnivores right or people who are in keto or people who are in your church or you know some other group that you feel very very tight with um and they were helping you pay your Healthcare expenses would you be nearly as willing to extract as much value out of that because now I'm taking anony Dr Anthony's money I'm not taking United healthcare's money anymore I'm talk I'm taking Anthony's money you know it makes it much more personal much more human and so I think we need to get rid of those middlemen and get it make it human to human again so that we bring a little bit of humanity back to you know our government our health care System all these things that have kind of like stuck themselves in between us and our neighbor and I think has has kind of stolen the idea of generosity and helping each other and Community away from us you know I kind of make this statement where in the 1970s and 80s um you know most parts of the country if somebody moved in next to you you'd bring them something like you bring them cookies or You' do whatever because that's their neighbor right like you want to do that now in 2020 you know four I guess we're in is the we're interested if our neighbor Moves In by how much they paid for that house because that's an indicator of how our house is worth right like that's our primary interest but I think that because the reason is is because all of those government things that have they've installed in our system to to protect us actually takes away our our responsibility our need for taking care of our community members and that's the same thing that's happening with health insurance it's like man let's let's put that back together I mean there's so much goodness in in community you know I'm I'm a bitcoiner so I hear this thing like sovereign individual like which is we are personally responsible for ourselves which is an awesome thing and what's even better is when you have a community of sovereign individuals getting together you have a pretty powerful um pretty powerful Community right you don't have any freeloaders everybody's personally Sovereign for their own you know their own health their own nutrition their own everything you get all those people into a community I mean you can drastically lower the cost of doing Health Care in in a community like that so so um that's my long-winded way of saying I'm I'm a huge so fan I think government should get as out as much as possible health insurance should get out as much as possible and let us pay for our own stuff because that's where free markets are that's where Community can be created um and you know it's a a pretty powerful thing it is and we had we had a solid 150 years of that in America and we we saw this in real time and and we had an entire nation of of sovereign individuals that was the entire point you know it's like this is you're king of your own castle and you know this is Your Land This Is Your Land This is basically everyone here has their own country it's your land that's your land and we sort of and that's why you needed to you know own land in order to in order to be able to vote because it was just like hey this is everybody who are all the land owners we're going to talk about what goes on with our land right yeah and you also have responsibilities it was not a right to vote it was a responsibility you had to sign up for this and you signed up for the responsibilities as that came along with that which was you had to be part of the fire brigade you had to be part of the militia you had you were eligible for the draft now so you know all you know you couldn't be drafted into a war unless you were one of these you know evil you know patriarchal whatevers who were able to vote and were suppressing everybody else you know that was part of your responsibility and the women's suffrage movement in the 1800s were saying you know women should be able to vote as well a lot of 76% of women said no no we don't want that because a it's a household vote we don't think of this as like the man is voting he's he's casting a vote for the household and we decide as a household how we're going to vote um and also we don't want to die in a fire and go to war like what's wrong with you you know like we don't want those responsibilities that come along with with the you know the the you know not right to vote you know the responsibility rep interesting point and so they said okay well we'll get rid of the the responsibilities I think is a big mistake you know I think if you don't have skin in the game if you don't have if you doesn't even have to be you know owning land or something like that but just the simple fact that you know if you if you are voting on a war that you can't be drafted into that's not doesn't affect you on that you know then it's like you know you might you might think about things differently yeah and so amen you know it's um you know having those responsibilities to tie up with it you you're just going to think about things a bit differently you know and uh and certainly going to pay for things differently you know that like you said um you know about people you know being Sovereign they're going to spend things more more carefully you know no one's going to spend your money more carefully than you are right because it personally hurts you know like you look at that those are hours of my life that I traded for that and now I'm just I'm just not just going to waste it on something is be like oh great well that was that was 500 hours of my life that I just just flushed down the toilet great I mean that that hits you personally right someone else spending someone else's money you know it doesn't even matter especially when you start getting into these big figures like you said hundred million dollar or hundred billion dollars for these entitlements but just the small subfraction of entitlements that are going out there uh it's just like yeah whatever it's not that big of a deal when you start dealing with things like that I mean the amount of waste is astronomical I have a good friend of mine that I grew up with he's a corporate attorney in Seattle and he his his firm he was a partner in this firm and so and they do a lot of big deals with like World Bank and other sorts of things so they're giv like massive you know government loans and and building up whole infrastructures and things like that so they're regularly doing h1200 Billion Dollar Deals right and so they're going through all the fine points I mean it's a lot of different things in there that that add up to hundred billion dollar $200 billion doar and um and so he there was this point and it was just like the the people on the other side of the table were just sort of like Qui they were trying to like fluff over this one part and he was just and he you was a bit skeptical of that so he looked into it and basically it was about 36 million dollar that they were going to get you know supp purist that that that they really shouldn't have and he was like well hold on a second this this 36 million dollar you know this isn't accounted for you know this isn't this shouldn't be you know just lumped in with this this and that and they're oh well you know it's not that big a deal just $36 million I mean it's a $100 million deal I mean what's what's the difference 36 million it's nothing and the guys on his table were like yeah I mean what's the big deal it's just $36 million it's just $36 million and he was just like what the hell are you talking about it's $36 million we're talking about this you know we are absolutely gonna sort this out like no this is this is stupid and that's the thing you're dealing with things of that of that scale you just lose site you know it's just like you you're you're from an airplane you're looking down at at ants it's just like ah it's not that big a deal it's just some ants you you just wipe them out it's not that big of a deal just $36 million who cares it's not your Goddamn money that's that's that's why you should care yeah you need to be responsible about this um you know I I you know also you know seen it argued and and and seen this in real life that when you when you reduce when when you stop when you separate out the payment like you said say when you're when you don't see where your money's going for this payment you just say oh it's just free it's free healthare instantly you increase the demand without increasing the supply because you can just go to the doctor for anything because it's free so who gives a right so it's just like you have a sniffle you know it's a virus you know it's going to get better in a couple days but you know what I get the day off work I can go to I can go to the doctor and all this sort of stuff and so and so you do so you massively increase you know the the demand which increase the cost because we don't have the same Supply that's how Supply demand curves work and whereas if you were paying for that if you had to go and you had to pay a doctor you know 100 bucks 150 bucks or something like that to see him you you wouldn't go unless it actually meant something to you you know when I do consultations like I don't I don't do this as a as a job because I want to make money I just I just want to make it worth it to people so that they they come to me with real problems that they can't figure out themselves I even say on my disclaimer I was like listen I make all my videos available for free I want people to be able to educate themselves for free I don't want them to have to you know this this shouldn't be behind a pay wall so all this stuff is here you know if you need special individual care that goes beyond that I'm happy to do this but you know please try to to answer your questions here and I make it costly enough that it it it matters to them so they're it's going to mean something to them because if you don't do that and it's just like you know and it's just open season and everyone gets to book an appointment with me I I have absolutely nothing else that I can do with my life because it's just like it's just it's just going to be completely full and it may or may not be for good reasons and that's the thing with with Healthcare now is that we've completely overrun the system with you know Superfluous appointments that people don't really need necessarily obviously a lot of people do but I think that regardless of the system regardless of what you do if it's purely free market system it's a purely onepay universal healthcare VA wretched system you know that either way no matter how you do it no system is going to survive the massive in inundation of chronic diseases of actual true illnesses you know so 9% of Americans have diabetes that accounts for 75% of the Medicare costs and so 4 % of Americans are pre-diabetic so ostensibly within a decade you could have fully 50% of the population of the United States gez fully diabetic what the hell is that going to do to the health care cost Dr Robert lustig estimated that you know you say like was it $4.6 trillion dollars we spend a year on Healthcare he estimated um that that we spend about 2.4 trillion of those dollars just treating the effects of sugar consumption alone just sugar consumption oh doesn't that doesn't shock me I know it's a trillion on Diabetes patients directly it doesn't shock me there would be another 1.4 on other sugar related metabolic Health you know concerns there you go so you know I mean you know $1 trillion dollar a year on diabetics and you might quintuple the number of diabetics that we have out there right so this this is pretty easy math this gets out of control very quickly you know this becomes larger than the the the annual federal budget of the United States which everyone agrees is way over way over and so you know people say well diabetes is up from one% in 1970 to now you said nine I've seen 10 but you know it's NX or 10x you know over the last yeah 50 years which is just crazy and the vast majority of that if not almost all of that is type two yeah right I mean not many more people are getting type ones you know it's type twos yeah and so um interestingly enough women that eat more gluten have more commonly have kids with type one some sort of weird ass connection there but um so yeah but that but that's your Healthcare crisis yeah crazy we're we're we're spending multiple trillions of doar and this is just the US right so I mean this is this is this affects everybody you know the diabetes rates in India and China are just out absolutely through the roof I heard a statistic the other day I think it was it was one in something one in three men or one in three or sorry one in four men or one in three or four people Jesus why can't I speak um in India will die of a heart attack that's massive that's absolutely massive and so that's crazy you know and and so you know that's your health care crisis regardless of regardless of what your system is it's going to crash any system you know if you if you keep compounding this chronic disease and all these problems then you you will never have a system that will work it doesn't matter what the system is it be the most efficient and beautiful and wonderful system in the world it's going to it's going to crumble and so you know I think it's I think it is very important to to go outside of of the medical system but I think you know at the same time you know it's going to be the same people sort of you know thinking about these things and thinking about their health and being health conscious they're going to be going to your sort of system and saying hey this is this is sort of an emergency just in case sort of thing I'm not just going to be in here every single day because you I'm going to take care of my health I'm G be morec conscious about this and they're seeing like I'm not getting my any bang for my buck out of this insurance plan so I'm going to go to this other thing but you know the the the I heard a statistic as well a few months ago that it's something like 92% of health care costs go into or 93% of of the issues treated and healthc care costs go to treating chronic disease right yeah so it's like 8 10% is the entire body of medical literature throughout and Antiquity which is child birth and delivery you know pregnancy child birth and delivery childhood you know sort of uh diseases like congenital diseases genetic abnormalities um infectious disease trauma and poisoning you know you get you get poison exposure you get bitten by something or a scorpion bite or something a scorpion sting and now that's that's down to 8% 10% of what we're doing and rest of is 90% is just this chronic disease which I think is actually in that last category poisoning I think we're poisoning ourselves and malnutrition right you're not getting enough nutrient we're poisoning ourselves and we're malnourished and so and our bodies are just breaking down and getting sick and we we fix the way we eat which is my whole you know my my whole uh Mission here and then you scrunch back down to that eight% you know so that's that that'll fine you want you want government payer Healthcare 100% you go for it but if you squeeze it down to that 8% you know then then it's at least manageable whereas it is not manageable right now we have four and a half year weight times just to get in to see somebody and then it's a year or two before you get surgery you know I mean that that's just not sustainable I mean people are really really suffering and yeah you can you can float it for a while and just take care of the emergencies and just sort of push everybody else to the back but you are hurting Society while you're doing that because those people are not functional members of society they cannot be out there working they cannot be out they're you know doing their job and contributing to the rest of society either and now they're a drain on society they're taking they're not paying taxes and they're just taking uh disability and um and for what you know so that they can sit there in pain for six years and not get treated and by the time they get out are they are they even qualified to do their job anymore you know they haven't worked in six years how the hell are you going to get a job after six years unemployed you know that's that's really really damaging to people and so I think that definitely need some some work done so I appreciate you throwing your hat in the ring and trying to do that yeah some somebody's got to do it you know would would love you know any of your listeners to come join us if they want to be a part of something that's trying to change us crazy crazy system you know we've got you our our folks are typically in their mid-30s they're typically you know nutritionally you know aligned we're getting lots of folks from you know I've been on on Dr Sean Brit Baker's uh you know podcast and the meet Mafia guys and and a lot of those so we've got a a group of of Highly aligned uh you know folks who who are the from from my perspective the perfect folks to you know help each other with with Healthcare expenses I'd prefer to to fund those folks than the ones who are eating brownies on the couch uh you know right now so um we've got a good group of people who to to to fund each other's Healthcare expenses and and if anybody wants to join us we' we'd love to to have you yeah absolutely absolutely well to that end how how do people find you and how do people uh you know take a look and learn more about your your company yeah um join crowd health.com is our website join crowd Health on all the kind of social media platforms and if you use the code or the promo code plant free um it's the first three months are 99 bucks so per person which is you know awesome to get your health care paid for for 99 bucks a month and uh we'd love for you to try it and and see what it's like and um you know that's that's less than your cable TV probably so come in and try it if you like it great stick around with us because we've got a great group and if not that's fine too but we think you'll like it so join crowd health.com plantree is the promo code awesome um and so so part of that that premium would go to like a savings fund or how does that work yeah so of the let's just say of the the 99 um if you're if you use the code uh 50 bucks comes to crowd Health um that's just for us to pay our bills um and the the rest of it goes to another person in the community that that needs help that month um so we don't touch that money it just goes directly to them and you know it's it's it's kind of cool to to be able to know that your money is helping you know Dr Anthony or you know Abby in Tennessee or whoever right with helps them directly and not going to the United healthc Care's bottom line so um it is a a peer-to-peer funding of of healthcare expenses that's you know totally different from health insurance and because of that we're getting way way better pricing and which means it's late way less expensive for our for our members yeah yeah very good and so is there is there any so it's all directly to to the person is there any like saving aspect and then using that to to pay for things down the line or is it really just direct to yeah it's direct and and you know we are saving I mean I saved you know $20,000 last year on Healthcare expenses I went to Obama care and looked and saw like what I could get from me and my family and um you know doing the math we saved 20 grand um you know if you're a single person you could probably save a single person in the United States is probably paying somewhere around four or 500 bucks a month for health insurance um you know you probably have a four or $5,000 deductible and so that's basically saying that the health plan has to pay $10,000 before you know or you have to pay $110,000 before the health plan pays you know a dollar um you know if you're a family often times it's $30,000 before you before the health insurance plan pays a dollar so my Obamacare this year I just checked it it was 1,400 bucks a month and it was a I think it was an $188,000 deductible which basically which basically means that you have to spend you know 14 time 12 whatever that whatever that is you know6 or $166,000 plus an $18,000 so that's $34,000 that you have to pay before the insurance plan pays anything um and to me that's just a total ripoff whereas our family of four with crowd Health pays 600 bucks a month so $7,200 a year and then I just pay the first $500 of any health event we had one or two health events last year so that'd be another thousand so that would be 8,000 so you know pretty easy math 32,000 minus 8,000 um you get the mid $20,000 range in terms of of savings so that's that's the impact that crowd Health can have on on your financial um so it's it's pretty significant yeah well fantastic well we'll put all those links in the description again Cod plant free if you guys want to have a have a less expensive introductory trial and you can see what you guys think uh Andy thank you so much for coming on it's been an absolute pleasure as a joy talking to you yeah thanks for having me appreciate it not a problem thanks everyone for watching please uh click the like And subscribe leave a comment it really helps the algorithm get this out there and if you know someone that this might apply to or May help please do share it with them and we'll see you next time