The Bitcoin Standard Podcast - 270. Crowdhealth with Andy Schoonover

2025-04-22

• CrowdHealth, an innovative model that decentralizes healthcare by allowing members to directly help each other pay for medical expenses without the interference of traditional insurance companies, emphasizing a more personal and economical approach to healthcare financing. How do you think a decentralized healthcare model could impact the overall cost and accessibility of medical care in the long run?

• Another key point explored is the principal-agent problem within the health insurance industry, highlighting how insurance companies' profit incentives often lead to higher healthcare costs for consumers, while emphasizing that individuals can sometimes negotiate better prices directly with healthcare providers. In what ways do you think using Bitcoin for healthcare transactions could further disrupt the current systems of health insurance and pricing?

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Discussion

When I was a kid, doctors still made house calls. They knew your name, your parents, your story. Sometimes they’d even trade services if you couldn’t pay — food, a load of firewood, handyman work, whatever you had. Healthcare was personal. It wasn’t perfect, but there was trust.

Now even in small towns, most doctors work for some corporate system. Their patients aren’t really their patients anymore. They’re just names on a chart that gets reviewed by HR departments and administrators who’ve never treated a patient in their lives. The connection is gone — and with it, the accountability.

A decentralized model like CrowdHealth flips that dynamic. It puts people back in charge of caring for each other, without funneling everything through layers of middlemen who drive up costs. When you take the bureaucracy out, healthcare gets cheaper, more personal, and more responsive. You rebuild the trust that the old system destroyed.

Bitcoin fits this model perfectly because it’s built for direct, trustless transactions. No middleman, no approvals, no games. Just two people agreeing on value and settling it between themselves.

When you pay a doctor in Bitcoin, the price is the price. There’s no insurance company inflating it for billing, no hidden administrative fees baked in. It forces real transparency. It protects both sides — the doctor knows they’ll get paid, and the patient knows exactly what they’re paying for.

In something like CrowdHealth, Bitcoin isn’t just a payment method — it’s part of the mindset. Decentralized money for decentralized care. No need to ask for permission. You reclaim ownership — of your money, your care, and your decisions.

Though it seems — or maybe I’m afraid — that most people, like it or not, will stay with the system as it is. It’s the whole fish in water deal. People have lives, homes, work, kids to take care of. They just want to live their lives.

It’s not the average person’s fault that society got caught up and melded into this thing that’s now incentivized to keep itself going.

But hopefully, Bitcoin will help chip away at that — block by block.