CrowdHealth to Save American Healthcare
CrowdHealth and the End of the Insurance Monopoly
How one father’s frustration exposed a $4 trillion problem
A Personal Breaking Point
The story begins with a single moment of disbelief.
When Andy Schoonover’s one-year-old daughter needed a common ear procedure, the family’s insurance company denied coverage — labeling it “non-essential.” The bill came to $8,000. Years of expensive premiums meant nothing when care was actually needed.
That was the breaking point.
Schoonover saw, firsthand, that health insurance in America had become a machine designed to preserve itself, not protect families. So he walked away from it — and built CrowdHealth, a platform created to replace the broken model entirely.
The Health Insurance Monopoly: America’s Most Expensive Illusion
America’s health insurance industry is not a market. It’s a monopoly in polite disguise.
A handful of conglomerates — UnitedHealth, Blue Cross, Cigna, Humana, Aetna — dominate the flow of money between patients and care providers. They set the prices, define the rules, and decide what qualifies as “necessary.” They negotiate behind closed doors while patients remain blind to what anything actually costs.
The result is a system that thrives on opacity. Every hidden markup, denied claim, and bureaucratic delay feeds the same engine of profit.
Here’s the playbook:
Step 1: Convince employers and individuals that insurance is the only safe option.
Step 2: Raise premiums annually, regardless of system performance.
Step 3: Deny coverage whenever possible, citing obscure codes and internal reviews.
Step 4: Use complex billing to ensure that even doctors don’t know what they’ll be paid.
This is not protection — it’s rent-seeking disguised as safety.
Americans now spend more on healthcare administration than any other country spends on care. The average family premium has tripled in two decades. Yet hospitals close, nurses burn out, and half a million families go bankrupt each year from medical bills — many of them insured.
Health insurance is not a healthcare system. It’s a financial barrier erected between patients and doctors, sustained by fear and inertia.
CrowdHealth: Returning Medicine to People Who Need It
CrowdHealth was built to dismantle that barrier.
It doesn’t sell “coverage.” It doesn’t play actuarial shell games. It creates community-based financial solidarity where real people help each other pay medical bills directly — without insurers, adjusters, or fine print.
Here’s how it changes the equation:
Transparency replaces confusion. Every medical cost is visible and negotiable. Members know what procedures actually cost before they get them.
People replace paperwork. When a large bill arises, members help fund it directly. Every dollar moves with purpose, not bureaucracy.
Freedom replaces fear. Members choose any doctor, anywhere. No networks, no referrals, no denials.
Value replaces volume. CrowdHealth negotiates cash rates — often 50% below what insurers pay for the same procedure — because providers prefer prompt, transparent payment.
This isn’t health insurance reform. It’s insurance abolition, replaced by something better: a health funding system that works for humans.
How the Monopoly Breaks
Insurance companies rely on scale, complexity, and dependency. CrowdHealth attacks all three.
Scale: The monopoly’s advantage is size — but CrowdHealth flips that into a weakness. Small, agile communities can move faster, pay quicker, and organize around shared incentives.
Complexity: The entire insurance business model depends on confusion — CPT codes, pre-authorizations, deductible tiers. CrowdHealth strips that away, turning healthcare into a transparent transaction between patient and provider.
Dependency: Insurance companies trap people by tying health coverage to employment. CrowdHealth unties that knot completely. Membership is portable, simple, and free from corporate control.
Every time a family or freelancer joins CrowdHealth, the monopoly loses another link in its chain.
The Economic Logic of Freedom
When patients and doctors transact directly, prices fall.
When communities share risk voluntarily, trust rises.
When intermediaries are removed, care improves.
CrowdHealth proves that the entire pricing crisis in American healthcare is artificial — a product of a cartel that adds friction to every interaction.
Without the administrative waste of the insurance industry, providers can charge less and get paid faster. Without opaque “networks,” patients regain agency. Without fear of denial, families make health decisions based on need, not coverage rules.
This is not utopian idealism — it’s how every other functional market works. We’ve simply been trained to accept healthcare as the one domain where transparency is impossible. CrowdHealth proves it’s not.
Reclaiming Health as a Common Good
CrowdHealth isn’t just about cutting costs — it’s about reclaiming dignity.
The health insurance industry has turned the most intimate human experience — getting sick and getting better — into a cold, adversarial negotiation. Patients become “cases.” Doctors become “providers.” Care becomes “claims.”
CrowdHealth replaces that with something ancient and simple: people helping people. It brings back the community logic that underpinned early mutual aid societies — updated with the efficiency of modern technology.
When a member faces a large medical bill, hundreds of others step forward to help. They do it voluntarily, transparently, and efficiently. The community, not a corporate bureaucracy, decides what’s fair and how to help.
That’s not just a new financial model — it’s a new moral model.
The Future: A Parallel System Rising
If insurance is a monopoly, CrowdHealth is the free market response.
It scales not through coercion but through consent. It grows as people opt out of a broken system and into one that rewards honesty, transparency, and trust. It’s the grassroots decentralization of healthcare finance — a system built from the bottom up instead of dictated from the top down.
Every member who joins makes the network stronger. Every bill paid directly chips away at the illusion that health insurance is indispensable. Every successful medical negotiation proves that patients and doctors can work together — and win — without middlemen.
Conclusion: The Beginning of the End
For decades, the health insurance monopoly has drained the vitality out of American medicine. It made us think protection had to come with permission, and that bureaucracy was the price of safety.
CrowdHealth breaks that spell.
By combining community funding, transparent pricing, and direct payment, it restores the freedom that should have never been lost — the freedom to choose, to know, and to care for one another without interference.
The revolution in healthcare won’t come from inside the insurance industry. It will come from outside — from platforms like CrowdHealth that replace institutional control with human cooperation.
What Andy Schoonover started as a reaction to one outrageous bill is quickly becoming something much larger: a movement to return healthcare to the people it belongs to.
