One, if you have some symptom and your asked to get an MRI, and you are not sophisticated enough to know if you need it or not and you would rather spend the money doing something else. Is that really healthcare, and is a healthcare a right or a privilege?
Female Speaker
There are no prices on anything here.
Male Speaker
Oh, believe me, some of it is pretty spendy. Whoa! That has really gone up?
Female Speaker
Stop. I do not need both, just one or the other and it depends on the price.
Male Speaker
Oh! That is called shopping. We do not do that here. Thank you for coming in. Your bill, your version will be mailed to you in 30 days. Good luck trying to make some sense of it.
Annie Lamont
All right, so that is the world we all live in, right? I mean it is kind of amazing. You do not even think about understanding prices. So, when we think about investing, it is actually providing solutions to consumers but through employers or somebody who is actually going to pay for the solution and that I think is an example. There are really two parts of consumers when I am thinking healthcare right now.
First, you actually have healthcare.org, public exchanges, it is actually consumers. You are actually for the first time learning how to intelligently by healthcare. Benefit Focus, one of our company’s largest exchange. They actually have put 22 million people through employers and payers on healthcare exchanges, private exchanges effectively this January. And that is a real consumers and because you are actually given an essentially defined contribution amount of money and you know you are buying your insurance. So that I would call the first act.
The second act of being a consumer is understanding what does something cost you in the healthcare system and what are you getting for it? What is the quality? They do not have just the quality but you know, location? I mean there are lots of considerations when looking for value in healthcare and we do not have it yet. We are investing on what they call cast leg which went public last quarter. And what they are doing is through employers of B to B to C model is providing a website that effectively tells you where you are in your deductable. If you are at a soccer field on a Saturday and your child has broken their leg, or you think they might have, you look at the mobile application and you would say, “Gosh! I could go two miles for the local emergency room and it would cost $3,000 of which I am going to pay a thousand, or I could go to this clinic that is half a mile away. I would pay $200 and they have an X-ray equipment, and they are rated, you know have a four star rating.”
I mean that is the healthcare world that we are beginning to live in, and I think it is going to absolutely transform how we think about it.
Richard Merkin
So, is that healthcare for the more sophisticated consumer? If you are an unsophisticated consumer, and you have an issue, and your deductable is so high, you have to choose whether to follow your doctor’s instructions or not. And you might not be able to afford that deductable. So, I guess I have to two questions for you.
One, if you have some symptom and your asked to get an MRI, and you are not sophisticated enough to know if you need it or not and you would rather spend the money doing something else. Is that really healthcare, and is a healthcare a right or a privilege?