CFD 507 – The Problem With Healthcare And How To Fix It

January 10th, 2019

Dave Chase is the author of The CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream and co-founder of Health Rosetta. He was also co-founder & CEO of Avado, a digital health company acquired by & integrated into WebMD & Medscape. He was named one of the most influential people in Digital Health due to his entrepreneurial success, speaking & writing. Chase spent several years outside of healthcare in startups as a founder or in consulting roles with LiveRez.com, MarketLeader, and WhatCounts. He was also on the founding & leadership teams in two $1B+ businesses within Microsoft including their $2 billion healthcare platform business.

Podcast Highlights

  • Who is Dave Chase?

Dave is a congenital optimist but he’s also a straight shooter. The genesis of his journey started out with his career in consulting while working with hospitals. Once he learned of something referred to as Revenue Cycle Management and realized the impact it has had on the middle class, he knew he needed to make a change.

Healthcare has a number of ways to bill for services with plenty of ways to pad the end result. This billing paradigm is responsible for about half the revenue in the industry, roughly $7 trillion.

By the time Dave was 30 he had 10 friends that were his age or younger die, with the last one being an egregious example of healthcare failure. In many ways, the state of the healthcare industry is responsible for the decline in public education quality. The good news about what Dave is working on is that government is not the answer, once people have the hope that the system can be improved, we already have the tools to get it done.

  • Belief in Healthcare Change

Dave knows the secrets of healthcare without being shackled by them. Dave believes that once you see a problem, you are obligated to fix it or you are complicit with it. For Dave’s business, the failure scenario is to reach 10 million people and they are already halfway there.

Dave went looking for a market gap, and found the greatest heist in American history.

Dave works with businesses as small as a single person, the tools you have access to are just a little different from larger businesses. The typical family of four will pay over $20,000 a year for pretty poor healthcare benefits whereas smaller organizations could get coverage for as low as $6,000 a year.

You’re in the healthcare business whether you like it or not.

From Dave’s experience, there hasn’t been a hospital bill over $5,000 that hasn’t gone out without an error. The most common issue is something called pricing failure which is when there is no connection between what you pay and the value you receive. A lot of the times the places that are most expensive have the poorest quality care.

Part of high quality in healthcare is not doing procedures that aren’t necessary. Some of the procedures performed today are going to be seen as lobotomies and bloodletting in the future because they just don’t work. 2% of the entire US economy is squandered and tied up in non-evidence based, non-value add procedures that have no evidence to prove they’re effective at all.

  • How did this happen?

If you increase costs by 5% every year, after 20 years, here we are. Healthcare used to be 2% of payroll, now it’s 20% and healthcare is close to a fifth of the economy. This is why employees have had 20 years of wage stagnation, it’s not because employers don’t want to spend the money on their employees but because it’s all going to increased healthcare spending.

The underlying costs of healthcare haven’t gone up in the past five years, but premiums and prices have gone up. You can employ more people, better people, and have more profit in your business if you just pay attention to your healthcare costs.

  • Dave’s Takeaway

If you have someone you work with that a benefits broker and your healthcare costs have gone up in the last five or ten years, there’s a good chance you’re working with the wrong person. You have to find someone that is aligned with your interests and not someone else’s. Dave certifies the next generation of benefits brokers and that’s a good place to start.

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