A Proposal for UnitedHealth Group To Merge with CrowdHealth
An open letter to the Board of Directors of UnitedHealth Group
To the leadership of UnitedHealth Group,
We are writing to offer you the opportunity to acquire CrowdHealth.
We know how this usually goes. Normally the company worth half a trillion dollars is the one doing the offering, and the small scrappy upstart is the one accepting. But we've thought about it carefully, and we believe the most valuable thing CrowdHealth has to offer is something that rarely shows up on a balance sheet: a way of running a healthcare company where the word "care" still does the heavy lifting. We would be honored to bring that to you.
Here is our six-point plan to restore "care" to UnitedHealthcare.
Point 1: Adopt a new core mission "Legit love our members"
That's the mission, in those exact words, and everything we do will revolve around it.
When a member goes in for surgery, we'll send a care package.
When a new member is born, we'll send a welcome gift to celebrate a new life joining the UnitedHealth family.
Every member will have a personal Care Advocate. No more call centers in foreign countries. Real personalized care is what we will be known for.
The idea is simple: treat the people who count on us like people we are LUCKY to serve. We're confident your members will welcome this new mission.
Point 2: Install our CEO as your CEO
To most effectively deliver on Point 1 we must change the culture. To do that, it must start at the top. Our founder will take the helm. He will earn a maximum of three times the average pay at UnitedHealth. He will receive a salary and nothing more. No options, no special grants, no golden parachute. We believe leadership should share in the same incentives as the people it serves, and we think this is the clearest way to show we mean it.
We know there will be skepticism on Street about this move. It’s difficult for Wall Street to hear that we will put people before profit. However, we believe their fears will be alleviated after they realize he graduate bottom cum laude (bottom 10%) at Stanford, and currently runs a 60 person company. Most importantly to our cultural transformation, he has built a company culture that puts its customers first as most effectively seen in our Trustpilot ratings (4.9 stars for CrowdHealth vs 1.2 stars for United).
Point 3: Be relentless about lowering prices
You are one of the ten largest companies in the world by revenue. That is an enormous amount of leverage, and we, as a combined entity, intend to point it squarely at the cost of care. CrowdHealth is 1/20,000 the size and we are finding prices that are about half of United’s cost.
We'll use our size to push prices down. Hospitals tell us they operate on single-digit margins and that much of their cost is fixed which means a payer the size of UnitedHealth carries real weight at the negotiating table. We intend to use that weight thoughtfully, and on behalf of our members.
Yes, as premiums decline, profits will dip in the short term. We're prepared for that, because we're playing a long game: lower prices and the new trusted reputation for keeping them low, will bring more members, and that growth will more than make up for the premium we give back along the way. If we take care of our members first, they will tell their friends that United is a great place to get coverage. Their friends will tell their friends. Human resources executives won’t have to spend as much time hearing about denials, and poor coverage. United will once again become the easy choice.
Point 4: Sell off anything that pulls us away from the mission
We'll divest Optum. We'll divest every secondary business line that creates an incentive to profit from the very costs we're working to bring down. It's hard to fully serve a member while also profiting from the pharmacy, the clinic, and the doctors. So, we'll keep our focus narrow and clear: lower premiums, and legit loving our members.
Point 5: Use our influence for patients, not profit capture
You have real standing with state and federal legislatures, and we'd like to put it to work for the people we cover.
We'll encourage lawmakers to limit hospital consolidation, a major driver of rising prices. We'll support repealing certificate-of-need laws, which too often keep entrepreneurs out of the market. We'll push to let doctors practice across state lines, so that a patient in one state and a willing physician in another aren't kept apart by paperwork. Lastly, we’ll use every means necessary to restore the ability for physicians to own hospitals because they know more about what it takes to care for patients than the MBAs.
Point 6: Let members shop, and let them pay cash
We'll help members see prices clearly and take advantage of direct pay discounts wherever they exist. We'll begin with employers, encouraging them to contract directly with their local hospitals. We will give people incentivizes for choosing a lower cost option even if the procedure fall above their deductible. And we'll accelerate CrowdHealth's founding mission: giving people the ability to pay their doctors and facilities directly, which consistently leads to far better pricing
The American healthcare system was handed to us in better shape than it's currently on track to be handed to our children. We have a genuine chance to change that, to be the carrier that shows every other carrier what's possible. To prove that a company can be both enormous and good, and that those two things were never really at odds.
Let's do this for the families who worry. For the parents who open the mail with their breath held. For the children who will inherit whatever we choose, today, to build.
We can lead the way. We hope you'll lead it with us.
Sincerely,
CrowdHealth
