#357: Andy Schoonover on How CrowdHealth Cuts Healthcare Costs with Market Principles

🔹 This episode is sponsored by: CrowdHealth

Ditch the bureaucracy and take control of your healthcare with a smarter, more transparent system. Join the revolution at joincrowdhealth.com with promo code BSFREE for a discount on your first three months.

—-  👋

Andy Schoonover returns to discuss CrowdHealth’s growth, its focus on reducing healthcare costs through market principles, and its stand against insurance bureaucracy, aiming to empower individuals with better financial and care decisions.

Andy’s Bio

Today's entrepreneur is Andy Schoonover, CEO and founder of CrowdHealth, a company that deploys a crowdfunding model to pay its users' medical bills.

After signing up with CrowdHealth, users pay a flat monthly fee of up to $175 for those aged six to 54 (the price is $325 a month for seniors and $225 a month young children); after that, they pay $500 per health event.

When a user is going to the doctor, all they have to do is tell the company when they're going and who they're seeing; while wellness checks, such as a primary care physician, OBGYN, or pediatrician, are completely covered without any additional payment required, if the user needs a follow-up with a specialist, such as surgery, the company can negotiate directly with that hospital or provider prior to the operation, and get the price lowered. CrowdHealth will even pay the bill before the patient ever gets to the doctor's office.

CrowdHealth, which is currently operating in all 50 states, and can even help people when they're overseas, recently launched with a $6 million round of funding from Next Coast Ventures and Activate Venture Partners.

After graduating with a BS in Commerce from the McIntire School at the University of Virginia, Schoonover started his career at Host Marriott Corporation (now Host Hotels & Resorts, NYSE: HST) in the Treasury, Asset Management and Acquisition and Development groups and completed transactions valued at approximately $1.5 billion.

He then moved to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford Business School where he got that entrepreneurial itch. As his friends headed off to Google, Facebook, and other high flying tech companies after graduation, Andy and Chris Hendriksen, his business school roommate, founded Blue Canyon Capital which was formed in September of 2006. Blue Canyon Capital then purchased Valued Relationships, Inc (VRI) in Dayton, Ohio. Andy became CEO and served in that role for five years. After a fourfold growth in revenues, the majority of VRI was sold to Pamlico Capital in 2014. VRI investors received a gross return of approximately 9x their investment.

Today Schoonover lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Stephanie where they are devoted parents to their daughter Grace’s legacy, younger daughter Ava, and their pup, Butler.

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