Guest
Andy Schoonover
Andy Schoonover - Turning Healthcare Into Bitcoin Circularity
- Healthcare is fundamentally broken due to misaligned incentives: insurance companies and hospitals profit when prices rise, creating no market forces to drive costs down. - CrowdHealth replaces insurance with direct peer-to-peer funding; members pay a subscription fee ($60–$420/month) and contribute directly to others' bills above $500, cutting typical costs by 50–80% versus insurance. - Paying cash directly to providers bypasses billing middlemen and reduces prices significantly; doctors spend ~two days per week fighting insurance, time saved when patients pay out-of-pocket. - CrowdHealth's negotiation team secures 60–80% discounts on hospital bills post-procedure; independent doctors and imaging centers often offer better quality at lower cost than hospital systems. - Zero member bankruptcies in five years; prices fell 11% from 2024 to 2025 (and are now lower than 2021), defying typical healthcare inflation. - Long-term vision includes Bitcoin circularity in healthcare—accepting Bitcoin payments and enabling members to fund each other in sats rather than fiat.
Bitcoin Fixes Healthcare with Andy Schoonover
- Andy Schoonover, founder and CEO of CrowdHealth, describes how government capture and insurance company incentives have created perverse pricing in healthcare, where both insurers and hospital systems benefit from rising costs rather than competition driving prices down. - CrowdHealth operates as a crowdfunding model for medical bills, not insurance: members contribute $175/month (individuals) or $695/month (families of 4+), keep the money in personal accounts earning interest, and crowdfund larger expenses from the community based on demonstrated reciprocity and good standing. - The U.S. healthcare system is built on information asymmetry and administrative bloat: 75–80% of hospital bills contain errors, doctors spend 30% of their time on insurance approvals, and billing creates a 2–3:1 ratio of administrative staff to physicians. - Bitcoin integration allows CrowdHealth members to hold up to 75% of their health savings account balance in Bitcoin, aligning incentives with sound money and removing the inflation pressure that pushes fiat-based health insurance premiums upward. - Procedural costs vary wildly across the U.S. (heart ablation: $86,000 in Wisconsin vs. $22,000 in Oklahoma City); obesity prevalence at 40% drives a 2×2×2 multiplier effect on total healthcare spending that could be reduced by $600 billion–$1 trillion if rates dropped to world average. - Community and reciprocity are central to CrowdHealth's model: crowdfunding requests show member participation history, creating social incentive to help; Bitcoiners and health-conscious communities form affinity groups that demonstrate higher willingness to contribute voluntarily.