Ideas in the Wild: John Butler is Pulling Back the Curtain on Health Insurance

I am a true fan of the underdog in this world. I see the employees working for all the companies around America as being the true underdogs right now.

In his new book Health Insurance Sucks, John Butler uncovers the sinister world of business healthcare and delivers new and powerful solutions that readers can implement today.

This book provides an entirely new way of approaching healthcare for employees, and arms readers with every weapon they need to fight against big insurance, big pharma, and the big government players that have controlled us all for decades. I recently caught up with John to learn what inspired him to write the book and his favorite idea he shares with readers.

What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?

Realizing that brokerage firms either cannot or will not offer many of the solutions being offered across America was the first moment that made me realize employers are not seeing the big picture. Most employees have no idea how much their employers are spending on their health insurance. It is hidden behind the Wizard of Oz curtain, because employers usually pay 75–100% of the employee’s premiums.

Since the employees are only having $50–75 deducted from their payroll every two weeks, how could they know what their boss pays in total to the insurance companies? Single premiums can range from $400-$900 a month depending on how bad the past claims have been for each employer.

Most employers are married to the concept of owning their own insurance contract. Of course, whenever a company does this they step into the risk-management business. This concept has caused US Steel to spend more on healthcare than they do on steel itself. And Starbucks now spends more on healthcare than they spend on coffee. This made it pretty clear to me that the current system is not working, and different frameworks of thought needed to be introduced to employers across America.

There truly wasn’t a specific exact moment I knew I needed to get the book out there. The truth is my journey began about seven years ago researching every element of the business healthcare system. As the years went on, the story just got better. Innovation has sprouted up all over the country. From two-person consulting groups to Silicon Valley innovations, the innovations have been consistently coming out week by week, month after month.

It’s finished with a crescendo when in June of 2019, President Trump signed in an executive order changing the law as of 2020. This is when the penalties were released from businesses and Secretariat came out of the gate for me.

What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?

Offering individual employees the moral choice of owning their own healthcare contracts. This is a very simple but explosive concept that cuts off the sinister head of the snake. In one chapter (within my book) I asked the reader to contemplate this situation:

Imagine if your boss had a car insurance plan for everyone at your company. Then you find out that a handful of your employees got DUIs last year, cracked up their cars, and everybody else’s rates at the company went up by 30–40%. Wouldn’t you at least go into your boss’s office and asked what the hell he was thinking?

Companies have never really seriously considered this concept in the past. Most of the reason is that the brokers (the distribution channel to the business healthcare world) have set up a system, along with the insurance and pharmacy companies, to benefit them and their gravy trains, not the employers and employees they “supposedly” work for.

Now that both employer and employee penalties have been eliminated, employers are free to do as they please, rather than do what the insurance companies tell them to do. Most employers are unaware that the laws have changed as of January 1st, 2020, allowing them many more choices in the marketplace than they’ve ever had before.

What’s a story of how you’ve applied this idea in your own life? What has it done for you?

Four years ago, my wife and I switched from our $4,000 deductible group insurance plan (costing $1,800 a month) to a healthsharing plan with a $500 deductible (costing $344 a month). This has saved us over $52,000 over the last three years. And we TRUST the healthshare company completely to pay our claims (past the $500 mark) for any medical occurrences.

Within my Consulting company, we are offering all of the different unique solutions in the book within our practice. Over the last seven years, I have developed sound relationships with the biggest brokerage firms in the nation, all the way down to the smallest solution partners across America. Not every one of the solutions mentioned in my book is right for every size company.

The Cafeteria plan design, or individually owned coverage, is easy and simple for companies of 25 to 200 employees. The PEO solution is proper for companies between 10 to about 150 employees. And Custom Health Plan Solutions are more readily considered within companies that are 250 to 25,000 employees. The brokers and brokerage firm relationships that I have developed are now ready to tackle any one of these three designs and allow me to put them on my RFP program.

I am a true fan of the underdog in this world. I see the employees working for all the companies around America as being the true underdogs right now. What this idea has done for me, is to light a fire within me, to put this knowledge into the eyes and ears of everybody I can across America. Most of the people work for small to mid-sized businesses across this country. If we can impact that particular population we make healthcare better and more affordable for everyone across America.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health.