How to reduce your healthcare cost
The average American spends over $9,000 on healthcare. Annually. And thats a problem.
The average American spends over $9,000 on healthcare. Annually. And thats a problem. To put that into perspective, the average person makes $56,000 annually — after taxes around $40,000. This means that healthcare costs over 20% of the average American’s income, and that kind of seems ridiculous.
While we can argue that the healthcare problem is fundamentally rooted in government bureaucracy, insurance providers, or miserly hospitals and doctors, doing so does not fundamentally remedy the situation we are in.
Instead, we can protest and boycott and attempt to change laws, but again, does this really help? These movements seem sparse, difficult and without sufficient fuel to reach critical mass. They seem idealized with no practical plan, and that makes it difficult to join.
You may read, like, share, or comment on these Facebook petitions, but again, do they really help?
Instead, some startups are trying to fundamentally change the underpinnings of the healthcare cost sector. And they are doing so with a voice and reason to help the American people, and they are doing it with a plan.
While still in the infancy stages, these startups can easily be categorized into two groups: ones that help you with insurance, and ones that help you with hospital bills.
Insurance:
This category of startups helps you find better insurance deals by curating, comparing, tailoring the insurance search as well as simplifying the process of getting insurance. They either do so on an individual, family level or on the business level.
Family Planning
HealthCompare is probably one of the best poster child examples of startups aiming to simplify the insurance finding process. They help curate a list of insurance providers for you and make it easy to compare them against each other.
Personally, though, I believe Joany solves this problem the best. They’re a healthcare concierge that takes care of the entire healthcare process stemming from finding the right doctor, to finding the right insurance provider. With all of the products in an easy to use design, as well as an excellent people oriented customer service, they will, in no doubt, do well.
Businesses
From the other end of the insurance spectrum, startups such as Liazon and HixMe work to help employers find comprehensive and quality health plans for their employees. The idea is that by working with large groups of people, these intermediary startup companies can leverage that power to further decrease the cost of healthcare plans for the employers while also providing quality service.
Medical Bill
This category aims to help reduce the medical bill of individuals who have had to go to a hospital for whatever reason. Many times, medical bills are mis-charged, with many of the costs being unnecessary or ridiculously expensive. To capitalize and remedy this error, there are a few startups that aim to challenge this entire process.
The most successful of these businesses is definitely getBetter. By looking at your medical bill, they find errors in cost, hiked up prices, or areas that are covered by your insurance agency to pay you back the money you deserve. And they do so with only a small fee from the money you get back. That means that in the unlikely case that you didn’t get paid back for your medical bill costs that you do not have to pay them.
The Caveat
The one caveat of these companies, however, is that dealing with insurance people is a hastle. With the insurance industry still meddling with fax and paper piles, and employees being unmotivated to remedy cost mistakes, a lot of time goes into paying back the patient. Therefore, despite the noble goals of these startups, they have a difficult succeeding. One tragic occurence of the bankruptcy of one of these companies is RemedyLabs and its story is worth taking a look at.
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