Launching a healthcare company

OK, fine. We’re all reaching the point of reader exhaustion on the issue, but one more blogger has decided to chime in on healthcare. Before you immediately click Next or remember to pay your dog’s vet bill online, let me promise to provide what I think is a slightly different conversation on the same subject.

Now, I’m an entrepreneurial spirited American, and for about two years, I have wanted to start a health insurance company. Not just any health insurance company, mind you. As an uninsured healthy young woman, I see the thousands of market opportunities our current healthcare misses.

Let’s start by de-coupling the relationship between healthcare and employers. After all, it was a series of unintentional laws that created the current employer-based insurance. Let’s just say we could insure people, whether they are employed or not, whether they switch jobs or move, and insure them for life. After all, keeping lifelong customers is much cheaper than constant turnover.

If an insurance company looks at its customers as lifetime partners, they suddenly have a new incentive to make sure this healthy young woman ages as gracefully, painlessly, and cheaply as possible. With this relationship, insurance companies might change their entire offerings to young and healthy people, encouraging them to invest time and energy into preventative healthcare. These people that prioritize and maintain their health will become healthier, and less costly older people.

As a young person, I am completely over-served by health insurance. I am expected to pay hundreds of dollars per month to have the exact same services that my parents have. Not surprisingly, at a young age, I don’t NEED all the services my parents have. I would be very happy to pay such a rate if I received value in return for my premium, in the form of a gym membership, a couple of annual checkups, emergency coverage, some yoga classes, a discount on my bicycle, and a Community Supported Agriculture box. But since I do not receive any of these benefits, and instead typically do not use my health insurance in an average year, I have chosen to save the money I would spend insurance, and pay expenses out of pocket. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, this is a much cheaper option at this moment. There are millions of people like me out there. We need to cover our emergencies, and we need a company that helps us pay to stay healthy throughout our lives.

Why is this so hard? Why should a young entrepreneurial American have insurmountable obstacles to starting a solid business idea?

I know some of the answers to these questions- especially as these answers relate to insurance profit margins, hospital negotiations, healthcare cooperatives, and regulation. Even still, my mind swirls at the impossibility of executing such a vision. There are creative work-arounds to most of the problems health insurance faces; it simply requires a smaller and more nimble company.

I’m not exactly seeking venture financing quite yet, but this idea continues to stew in my mind. I’m secretly hoping that the healthcare reform might open up some opportunities to people like me. If ideas such as this are able to grow, we can slowly start to cover our healthcare gap, and promote a more healthy United States.