Solve the Problem in Front of You: How Chris Habig is Disrupting the Status Quo in Healthcare

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I think right now where we see is people want to do something that they truly believe in and something that they can actually put their energy behind and not just go out and punch a time clock. And I think that's what you, the millennials and all the other generations, I think that's something that unites them across. That is that if you give people something to believe in, they will respond.

This is the launch your business podcast because we know starting a business is challenging, but it doesn't have to be confusing. Each week we'll give you the tactical advice and the necessary tools to scale your business without feeling burnt out. I'm Terry Rice, business development consultant and staff writer here at Entrepreneur Magazine. Let's dive in. Chris, how's it going today?

It's going very well, Terry. How are you?

I'm doing well, but I'll tell you a quick story because I wasn't doing so well last summer because as an entrepreneur, I realized how lucky I was that I was married and was getting my insurance through my wife's company. Uh, but unfortunately she got laid off. Her whole team did. And all of a sudden we were trying to figure out this insurance thing. And doing some research, I found that it was about $3,000 a month that I ended up paying for insurance until she fortunately got another job. But it's, it's sad to realize how many entrepreneurs don't have insurance or any kind of medical coverage whatsoever. And I have friends who I won't name right now who have like, you know, a bunch of followers on Instagram. They have like really great companies that they're, that they're. But on the low, they don't have insurance. And I just feel like you're going to be a perfect person to dispel some of the myths around insurance. Do we even need it? And also just giving us the way to, to develop some kind of plan where we don't have to feel like, you know, it's all or nothing. I can either, you know, have coverage or not, and, and dispel some of the myths around the cost as well. So before I lead into it too much, Chris, do you mind introducing yourself and, and what you do?

Absolutely. I'm ready to, I'm chopping out the bit to get into that one. My name is Christopher Haybig. I'm the CEO of a company called Freedom healthworks. And what we are is a independent concierge physician network across the United States. Some people say concierge medicine, other people will say direct primary care. What that means is that you as a patient have a direct relationship with your physician free of third party insurance. So we print up T shirts and hand it out to everybody that says insurance does not equal healthcare. And I think that's the biggest myth bust that we could put out there is the fact that you don't need some blue, you know, some card in your wallet that has a blue shield on it or blue cross or some big company's name on it to access trusted, private, good quality healthcare. And that's really what we built our business on for people like yourself. It's no secret that health insurance access is really a big barrier to people leaving corporate USA and starting their own gigs, whether they're entrepreneurs, whether it innovators, whether just want to go into business for themselves. It's a massive barrier like you ran into. And I guess I'm here to say that it doesn't have to be that scary.

So I'm glad we're talking about this because as an entrepreneur, you need to be at your best, right? You have to make sure you're performing well, you're productive and, and you can't do that if you're not healthy. And I think sometimes even worrying about the fact that you're not looking at certain things, you're not getting at your checkup, so and so forth, you know, the theater of the mind, we can invent all these things that might be wrong with us and really it might just be stress around your job or the fact that you, you know, you can't necessarily take care of yourself. So let's, let's unpack some of the myths around being able to access a doctor without insurance. Because I'll admit my ignorance, I thought that was the only path. Have things changed or was I just ignorant? I'll just put it that way.

I would say that there was a massive supply issue in physicians that were in a membership or cash friendly type of a practice. So you're not ignorant, you're not nuts. It's a common theme that we hear all the time. It started about 20 years ago, it really did, with the boom of physicians saying, I've had it with third party payers, whether that's commercial insurance or whether that's Medicare, Medicaid. And what that was happening, where our doctors were getting squeezed, right? So physicians right now have the highest suicide rate out of any profession in the United States. We are not doing our physicians and our nurses by extension any favors as a society by putting them in these hospital type of constructs where they are compensated based on how many people they see. And that's a big problem. People are not widgets. We don't get any type of synergies or anything like that. More productive physicians are, it's a very scary term for me as an individual patient. My DNA is unlike anybody else out there. I need a personal attention and that means that I need more time with my trusted physician. So about 20 years ago, a lot of these doctors started throwing off, you know, they'll say in their own words, the shackles, the yolks of these insurance contracts where they were bound to see 30 people a day and their reimbursements were coming, you know, lower and lower and lower and that all it did was drive up the price, drive up the overhead, all that kind of fun stuff. And so that started really what we call the DPC movement, direct primary care movement. And two of these Doctors saying, you know what, Screw it, I'm going to go back into independent medicine. I'm going to go back and be that kind of Norman Rockwell type of physician that I can make house calls, I can text my patients and I get paid directly by them. And we're talking, depending on what part of the country you're in, anywhere from 70 to 200 bucks a month, all in, no nickel and diming, no question marks, no surprise bills. It's kind of like a gym membership. You can walk in and use the gym every single day, or you can use it once a year. You're going to still pay the exact same month, monthly fee, monthly due, month in, month out. So when I talk about a supply problem, there weren't a lot of physicians doing it. There's still only a few thousand physicians out of the maybe half a million physicians out there that will see kind of a primary care, which is family medicine, pediatricians, internal medicine. So we have a long way to go. But it's growing leaps and bounds. And once patients realize, and I say that as consumers, once consumers realize that, I can go in and pay with this currency called US Dollars, I don't need to pay through insurance claims or deductibles or premiums to go see my doctor. It's kind of like a matrix situation where it's red pill, blue pill. And once you're in it, once you see it, you're like, wow, this is crazy. There is a cash friendly medical service economy out there that gets you better service and can get you higher quality healthcare while also saving money. So that's kind of the big grand view of what we're doing out there. So again, you're not alone in thinking this. And it's my job to come on and show people that, yeah, there's a whole different world out there and it's okay to step into it.

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It's actually an extra 45 minutes, give or take.

All right, well, there you go.

And the reason why, and the reason why, Terry, is, you know, physicians are scientists, right? We always say the practice of medicine is where art and science really intersects. It's a practice because they're constantly learning, constantly getting better. What we see is that physicians tend to peak in their career, actually in their 60s, because they get out of medical school in their late 20s, early 30s. They learn and about for 30 years. They are at their peak. Most other professionals peak in their late to 40s, early 50s. In a typical white collar environment, physicians have to learn about you. And so most of a diagnosis is built off of your family history and what you're currently doing, your current habits. And so once they understand where exactly you're coming from and have a baseline to kind of theorize, I guess a lot of the medical judgment is now far more accurate. And so what your example was, is spot on. And I think Gladwell wrote that, right? Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers. And so where he was going with that is that a lot of the medical profession will come in. They see you. The average time with a physician in insurance based practice is like seven minutes. Most of that now is spent with the physician's face in the computer trying to make as many notes because that's how they get paid. Most doctors work in a hospital environment where revenue maximization is the goal and you maximize revenue by putting as many CPT codes and diagnosis codes in there as possible. Our business model is flipped, where we are incentivized to heal you, to treat you, try to keep you as healthy as we possibly can, because that's going to keep you coming back and paying cash the next month, keeping your membership due up and going. And so I say all that knowing that when a doctor doesn't have enough time with you and they think something might be wrong, they're going to throw a battery of tests at you, which drives up your costs, which drives up the hospital revenue. But as a system, it layers on waste after waste. You probably don't need an mri, but since I'd only have, as a doctor, seven minutes to see you, I'm going to schedule you for an MRI because I'm scared of death that I didn't ask the right question in my seven minutes to actually find what's going on with you. And so a lot of it is cya, you know, when we talk about medical waste and why healthcare in America is so expensive, it's CYA across the board. Because that trusted relationship is just not there from a doctor and patient standpoint.

Chris, what I want to do is two things. One is I want to learn more about how you built this company. And then on the back end, it would be great to learn like a step by step process our listeners should go through and if they also want to explore this route. So what was the, how did, how did you come up with this idea? Like, how did you get started here?

So I have a real estate background, actually. I was in single family residential investment property management. And so we built out the investment side of it and then we had a great opportunity and so then we built a property management company and so we built out a business. We had a nice exit, which, you know, worked our tails off for that. But this theme of managing other people's assets and helping them become good landlords and so that they don't have to run over and unclog a toilet at 3am we took that on their professional management for other people's assets. And so we carried that theme into the medical world. Both my parents are physicians. I grew up in a physician's office in a small town north of Indianapolis. The school bus actually dropped me off at the doctor's office and I would sit there and so I thought, dad, you know, I could see him. He was such an integral part of this community. I thought all doctors were like that. And so I get to college and I'm like, yeah, hell yeah, I'm going to medical school. This is going to be great. I want to be a pillar of the community. I want to do the sidelines at Friday night football games, you know, that typical community physician. I started shadowing hospitalists and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, my bubble got burst big time of what the modern day physician in our world actually does and actually is. And I realized that we treat physicians like commodities. When you go to look for A new physician. You choose from a list of names on your insurance page, and then you just start calling to see who can get you in first. I'm like, this is weird. I don't want to be some name and some white coat with a stethoscope and so, you know, a few. So I went into real estate. I decided not to go to medical school and did some fun stuff with real estate and some different business ventures. And this idea and this pull towards the business of healthcare was kind of this wet newspaper on a windy day hit me in the face. It was always in the back of my mind. I'm like, there's gotta be something here. I listen to mom and dad and what they talk about. My parents said, hey, we're done. We're gonna retire and hang it up. Because the cost of doing business as an independent physician is it's unsustainable. We said, well, why? You've been in this community for 30 some years practicing. And they said, well, reimbursements take six. We take six months to get paid. After we see a patient, they're going down or get pressured, you know, to cut our payments. And then we have to bring on more and more staff to comply with the regulations that are coming down. Our margins are getting squeezed. It's just not worth our time anymore. It's better off to just retire. And I'm like, this is just absolutely nuts. And so we had a couple beers. I'm like, well, why don't you guys just hang a shingle and say, hey, you want to come see a doctor? A hundred bucks. And they kind of looked at me and said, isn't it illegal not to take insurance? And so that was the big bright light of like, holy crap. If you guys who have been independent practices and then joined a physician group, and if you don't know the caveats of what the medical service industry and medical care could be, I bet there's other doctors out there that do it too. And so we spent about a year and a half traveling in the country talking to physicians who kicked insurance out of the exam room and picking apart different parts of their model so that we could then go out, help physicians return to independent medicine, but not make the same mistakes and errors and sideways movements and waste time that other physicians did. And really, that's really what built our business. We help physicians get back into independent medicine as independent community based physicians using a membership model that does not work with third party insurance because the prices they charge are actually less than what insurance would charge patients. And supply back to the physicians.

When you speak about the frustration that your parents and other physicians experienced, it reminds me of how I assess restaurants and give me a moment here. So whenever I go to a new restaurant, like, there's always cool signs like, you know, like, nice menu and all this stuff. I do my best to take a look and see if I can see the cooks and the other staff, like the, you know, the people that aren't necessarily supposed to be customer facing and see, are they happy, are they enjoying their job, do they feel fulfilled? Because if I know if the cook's happy, oh, this is going to be a great meal. So to the point you're making, if a physician is frustrated that you're asking them all these questions and they're only going to get paid X amount, of course they're not going to be as happy as they could be. Right. So the meal's not going to be as good. And the prognosis might not be as good either because they're just like, you know, kind of getting through the day. So you're solving a problem where physicians do feel more valued, right. For all the work they put in to learn this knowledge and they're getting paid a fair amount. So I, I just really, I think this is brilliant. But when I think about you building this company, you're disrupting an industry. Right. Even your own parents didn't know that they were allowed to work without taking insurance. So I imagine you, you had to, you know, face some, some frustrations and some friction along the way. And I think if you could share some of those, it would help our listeners realize, hey, whatever industry you're in, there is a way. Is it going to be easy? No, but it is possible. So do you feel comfortable sharing some of the challenges that you had when you're getting this off the ground?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And it's a great point that I think every entrepreneur, entrepreneur faces when they're like, wow, I, I am really swimming against the tide here. I'm, I'm swimming upstream. It doesn't have to be this hard. We faced a massive education gap to this day. I've been doing this for about seven, eight years now. To this day, I would say maybe a third of our country's physicians know that this model even exists, even less from a patient standpoint. And we fight that every single day. And our team is good enough where they're able to handle people's objections. But it's this mindset, that one that I have to have insurance because it's always going to be there if I get sick, which is not true. I talked to heads of hospitals and they're like, yeah, we had a big insurance company, a national insurance company who denied 60% of our claims last year. So three out of five people who think that health insurance is this concrete, it's always going to be there. I'm paying through the nose for it, but it's going to be there if I need it. That is just false. And that is scary because that is the narrative that they've been fed. And so we face a massive education gap. And I just can't emphasize that enough that businesses, when they look at their benefits, it's like an ostrich with their head buried in the sand, right? Like cartoonish, that they don't want to talk about their benefits, they'll get fleeced and overpay, but they're so terrified of that conversation that they just refuse to have it. And I think in any type of situation or topic, like a conversation, open dialect is very, very healthy. Whether that's politics, whether that's business, whether that's innovation, entrepreneurship, you got to know what you're facing. And so I know I sound like a broken record here, Terry, but that was the biggest challenge, is kind of beating our heads against the way and saying, you know what? If we weren't so mission driven, if we were mercenaries and just trying to make a quick buck, I wouldn't be here talking to you today. So, you know, our entire team is very mission focused and that word tends to get thrown around a lot. But we believe in what we're doing. We're all patients of these practices and we understand what it takes to generate that relationship with a physician and then really what that means for us and our families to have access. For an example, most of our patients text their physicians. Like, very few of them will waste an afternoon or actually don't need to waste an afternoon. But very few of them go for inpatient in person visits most of the time. What we want to know from a physician is, is this normal? Am I okay? Right? Is it okay that, you know, I have some pain in my joints after exercising? Is it okay that my newborn is crying in the night? What do I do? And so most of our physicians are there to say, yes, this is okay, or hey, let's talk about this some more. It's that relationship aspect that we've really gotten away from the last few decades. So I know probably nothing earth shattering in that answer, Terry, but just educating people that there is a Different way of experiencing medical services.

You know, Chris, it's. It's interesting as we, as we part here, a few things. One is, this sounds like an amazing opportunity because often what do we do? We Google things like throw it in scratchy, and this is happening. You're like, okay, this sounds somewhat accurate, but what if you could actually talk to a real doctor and do that same thing and feel a lot more secure in the response? But beyond that, I mean, what I'm hearing, and I think what a lot of us will take away from this, is sometimes you have to focus on educating as opposed to selling. And once you educate, then it's much easier to sell. But if your audience is even aware of, like, you know what you're talking about or that this solution exists, then whatever you're pitching, no matter how great it is, is not going to land too well. But what I want to do is this. Imparting two requests here. One is how can we learn more about you and your service? And second, this one is going to be kind of tough. What is one lesson about entrepreneurship that you wish you learned sooner?

People can follow us. So freedomhealthworks.com will lead us to our main platform service website. We got a locations page on there that displays all the practices across the country that we work with. So hopefully there's one around your listeners. If not, let us know and submit a contact form through there. And if anybody wants to get in touch with me, submit a contact form. It'll get to me, I promise you. The one big thing about entrepreneurship that I wish I learned is that people will follow you. They will follow your dreams and your visions, and you need to just be honest with people. And I run across people all the time that say, hey, I'm having trouble growing or finding good talent, all this kind of stuff. And I think right now, where we see is people want to do something that they truly believe in and something that they can actually put their energy behind and not just go out and punch a time clock. And I think that's what the millennials and all the other generations, I think that's something that unites them across, that is that if you give people something to believe in, they will respond. And you have to trust them. And I'm not talking about going up and making like, you know, like General Patton or Steve Jobs, rah, rah speeches all the time, but you got to trust people to be able to execute that and give them the flexibility to work in. And I think I made a lot of stumbles early on is because, you know, I wanted to kind of micromanage that and this has to be this way and this way. But a lot of times as entrepreneurs, like, our gut feelings are not too far off. And so if you have an idea that already exists, like, you're gonna have a little bit of a difficulty doing that. Where I'm coming from. Like, we're category makers in this one. Like, we're trying to make an industry, which is totally a little different experience. And, you know, we don't have a flashlight stepping out into the dark. We're kind of towing our way through there to see what works. And once we find out what works, man, we pour everything we have through it. But you got to have good people around you. You got to trust your people, and they got to view you as a leader who, who knows where you want to go and then is trusting enough that if they find, if you find something doesn't work, you're not going to blow up your staff. You're going to say, great mistakes are okay. Let's just not repeat the same mistakes. And I think they'll, your team will go a long way with you doing that.

Wise words. We have to create a culture of trust and innovations. So, Chris, thank you so much for your time today. This has been incredible. I do appreciate it, Terry.

Pleasure. Thank you.

Apply what you've learned on today's show. You'll find the show notes and more resources at TerryRice co. Podcast. Again, that's TerryRice co podcast. And the best way to support this podcast is by subscribing, telling a friend, and leaving a review. Also, you can get more tips by following me on Instagram terryrice or follow me on LinkedIn. This episode was produced by Josh Wilcox of Brooklyn Podcasting Studio and edited by Dan Lardy. Special thanks to my wife, Dominique, for keeping our kids relatively quiet as I recorded. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time.