Marshall Allen, author of Never Pay the First Bill, argues that 180 million Americans with employer plans have untapped power to fix healthcare. If just 10% pushed back against deceptive practices, he says, it could flip the system. The real barrier isn't the system itself: it's the myth that consumers are helpless.
Questions this video answers
Never Pay the First Bill.
and Other Ways to Fight the Healthcare System and Win.
About 180 million Americans.
10%.
Chapters
Based on everything you've kind of seen and done through this book, if you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing in the healthcare system, in the mind and spirit of the consumer, kind of across the board, what do you think would have the biggest impact?
So I think the biggest impact would be is if we could get rid of the myth and that we're helpless and that there's nothing we can do about this. In each chapter of my book, I show individuals and employers who are fighting this battle and winning. So the title of the book is Never Pay the First Bill. But the subtitle, the last two words of the subtitle might be the most important. The subtitle is and Other Ways to Fight the Healthcare System and Win. The. And winning part is really the most important part. And, and I'm trying to obliterate this myth that we just have to trust someone else to take care of this for us. We can't trust anyone else to take care of it for us. If we could, we wouldn't find ourselves in this situation. You know, no one's riding into our rescue. So I hope that policymakers can make changes that will be better for us. But I am not recommending that anybody wait around for the Democrats or the Republicans to figure this out. They have not done so. They've had decades to do it. I'm also not waiting on the health care system to fix these problems. We hear all the time about these value based payment programs, these value based initiatives where the hospitals and the insurance companies, they basically are just telling us, don't worry about it, we got it taken care of, we got value based payment. Now you know what, the costs keep going up year after year after year and frankly, the system is undermined for the public by all these deceptive schemes that are hidden, frankly, unethical ways of taking more of our money than they should. Really, they're exploiting our sickness for profit is what's happening. And so we should not trust that the healthcare system is going to take care of this either. So what we need to do instead is take things into our own hands and we can do it. And I think that's what I want to obliterate is this idea that we can't do this ourselves. And I hear it all the time. So I've been on this book tour, right, and one of the questions people love to ask me is, well, isn't this really hard? I mean, are people really going to be able to do this? Well, sure, a lot of people won't be able to do this. But there are about 180 million Americans who find themselves in this position right now. Working age Americans, either uninsured or in employer sponsored plans. Let's say half of them were to push back. Let's say 10% of them were to push back. If 10% of that 180 million pushed back, they would flip the system on its head because we each have so much more power than we can appreciate. And our employers especially have a ton of power because they're really steering a lot more of the money. If our employers stepped up, it would be a total game changer. So I hope the book will stop allowing people to tell themselves they can't do anything. And I hope then that they'll have the courage to follow the lead of the people I document in the book who pushed back and had a victory. And the worst that can happen is that you lose the battle you fight. But even if you lose the battle, you're just in the same position you would have been in in the first place.
