Eliminating the High Cost of Healthcare in Your Business | David Berg | 285

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August 17, 2020

David Berg is the President and Co-Founder of Redirect Health, a company that uses unique healthcare strategies and affordable plans to help businesses attract and retain the employees they need.

With over 20 years of healthcare leadership experience, David Berg is committed to helping everyone have meaningful access to easy and truly affordable healthcare on their terms. David was a finalist for three Best-in-Class awards at the 2018 World Health Care Congress in Washington DC, as well as the winner of the Phoenix Business Journal 2017 Health Care Innovator Award. He is also the best-selling author of The Business Owner’s Guide to Fighting Healthcare.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

David Berg explains how his love for business inspired him to start his healthcare company
The unexpected connection between being lazy and being efficient
David gives an example of how eliminating something as simple, and irritating as copays can reduce healthcare costs by as much as 40%
Why David separates healthcare into two buckets: “everyday care” and “hospital and catastrophic care”
David discusses the economy around fear
Securing the move that comes before the winning move
David compares a complex system to a spider’s web and explains what makes it work
David’s advice: Back up and think for yourself before taking action
Where to learn more about David Berg and Redirect Health

In this episode…

With over 50% of Americans making only $15 an hour, the healthcare system as we know it is overpriced and overcomplicated. But does it have to be?

According to healthcare leader David Berg, we could eliminate as much as 40% of healthcare costs just by removing copays. The result: a more affordable and efficient system that benefits everyone. With this in mind, David founded Redirect Health, a company that has transformed the healthcare system with the idea that everyone should have meaningful access to easy and affordable healthcare.

In this episode of The Growth to Freedom Podcast, host Dan Kuschell interviews David Berg, President and Co-Founder of Redirect Health, about how he used his business mind and efficiency-first perspective to transform the healthcare system. Keep listening as David talks about why the concept of laziness isn’t always a bad thing, how to navigate our economy of fear, and the importance of always making your own decisions.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com.

Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall in growing your business? Well, let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. You can do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com. That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com.

In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free small business toolkit. You can get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com. That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com.

If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com.

Episode Transcript

Dan Kuschell 0:03

Welcome to growthtofreedom.com, the show that brings you inspiration, transformation, and leadership. We’re helping you to connect the dots, see the blind spots, and get unstuck. So you can go out and create more sales, more growth, more profits. More importantly, so you can have a bigger impact, a bigger reach, make a bigger difference, bigger contribution. Let me ask you, how much do you think you’re wasting in your business with the high cost of healthcare? And what if there was a better way to actually go out there and fight healthcare so that you could make healthcare an advantage in your business, that it could cost you 20, 30, even as much as 50%, 60% and more, less than it does today? Or what if you could actually turn healthcare into a profit model and a profit center in your business? How excited would you be? How would that shift the game for you? How would that shift your mindset about running your business? Well, today’s guest expert is uniquely qualified to talk on this topic. In fact, he’s built an entire, you know, suite of businesses helping hundreds and thousands of business owners like you all over the country. And in their businesses, they, get this, they give all their employees free healthcare. But he doesn’t stop there. Not only does he give his employees free healthcare, he gives virtually all of their family members free healthcare too, and he’ll tell you and he’s going to tell you how he’s been able to do this, how it’s turned into a profit center. He’s the president and co-founder of Redirect Health, a company that uses unique healthcare strategies to help businesses and business owners, founders, CEOs just like you to be able to attract and keep employees that they need that you probably want, right? You want those high productive people, right? Redirect Health is a solution that’s useful when traditional insurance and deductibles are Just way over the top. Have you found that to be true too? Have you found it to be a nuisance for you and your team? David Berg, Dr. David Berg is a finalist for three Best-in-Class awards. The 2018 World Healthcare Congress in Washington DC is the winner of the Phoenix Business Journal 2017 Healthcare Innovator Award, and is the author, multiple best-selling author of The Business Owner’s Guide to Fighting Healthcare. David, how are you? Good morning, Dan. Good morning. It’s great to have you with us.

David Berg 2:32

It’s great to be here.

Dan Kuschell 2:33

Awesome. I want to dive right into it. David, I mean, you have such a fascinating, we got a chance, First of all, we’ll thank Joe Polish. Because without Joe, we wouldn’t have gotten a chance to meet through Genius Network, doing genius networking. And so we remember when you first presented at Joe’s event in one of his offices initially talking about healthcare and how you’re revolutionizing healthcare first at home, in your own businesses, but then for others and kind of Got to see this expand, you’re now in 50 states just, you know, changing people’s lives. Before we get into some of this transformational strategy you you’ve built. Let’s, let’s go back, like why are you like on this mission on this journey to transform healthcare?

David Berg 3:18

Well, you know, a lot of people think that healthcare is the driver of it. I really like business. For it really, I like business and I happen to be really good at healthcare. So why would I use healthcare to make my business better? Business advantage, I think if I was in the car wash business, I’d be figuring out how to do the same thing with car washes. I don’t know. But I really have learned how to maneuver around the healthcare system. And we’re really good at it. We’ve got incredible processes in place and we’ve got some strategic we’ve done a lot of strategic thinking around it. That gives us huge advantages that others aren’t, don’t have and aren’t thinking about. So that just happens to be how we chose to help our business give ourselves a business advantage and it worked so well that I started helping some of my friends businesses, and it worked in probably about 12 to 15 of theirs. And next thing you know, they were taking all my friends were taking about my time helping them with their healthcare solutions that I turned it into a business in about 2013. So I could actually start charging my friends. Now, you know, you think any of my friends were would go in their pockets and pay me Nope. Turn to a real business. And we did. And now you’re right. We’re in all 50 states, we have probably about 1000 small business clients, some are getting pretty large now. Lots of men that are on the horizon right now that we’re talking to and big associations, but it’s just a common principle. That’s every makes sense to everybody. let’s eliminate the unnecessary spending in healthcare that’s taking away our business advantage and making it impossible to afford to buy what we need or provide what we need for people that make normal wages. $15 an hour is $20 an hour. $12 an hour. Those are normal wages. Those aren’t high wages. 51% of American workers make $15 an hour. Those are normal wages. So we’ve got to make the math work. And the best way I know to make the math work is to eliminate the unnecessary spending in healthcare.

Let's eliminate the unnecessary spending in healthcare that's taking away our business advantage and making it impossible to afford to buy what we need. - David Berg Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 5:14

And speaking of eliminating waste is I’ve gotten a chance to know you a bit, right over the last handful of years. Like, as I view you, you’re like one of the most efficient people that I’ve ever met. And looking at things unique. We were kind of talking about it before the show a lot of people look at, okay, what’s the, what’s the one, one domino here that I can tip over? That’ll knock down 1000 or one hinge that gives me exponential growth. But you look at it the one way you look at it, it seems, is the opposite of that is like, what’s the one domino if I take away it just solves all kinds of problems. Right? It eliminates a lot of the big issues or you know, if you’re watching right now you’re listening. You know, maybe you’ve seen the movie, The Founder. About Ray Kroc, and there’s a scene in the movie where he’s on the parking lot. And he’s kind of walking through the process of efficiency and effectiveness. And, you know, it’s like this whole idea of do things right do the right things. And he was a mad scientist like this. Well, as I envision you, David, to a degree, like I envision you that just naturally, you can find the holes, find the gaps, remove the domino that’s causing like these big blocks and big waste, you pull them out. Now the company not just by one domino is not just more efficient, but they’re exponentially more efficient. Talk to like, like, Where did this come from? How did you, How is it that you view the world this way compared to others? I’m curious.

David Berg 6:42

You know, just a little bit of a funny story. It kind of goes back when I was 19. I caught sleeping on my, my mother mother in law’s kept mother law to be’s couch and being lazy and she said she always saw me lying down. I was so lazy, and I couldn’t hold my tongue. I say, you know, Gloria, I love her to death. I’m going to get in trouble. She sees this. I say, you know, Gloria To the untrained eye, it’s hard to see the difference between laziness and massive efficiency. It didn’t go over really well. But that’s, that’s where I started. Like, I just started thinking about it, I double I had to double down and prove I was efficient, not lazy from a, you know, my college years. And but I think there is a there’s a connection between the two. Right? There’s an element of I don’t, it’s not that I’m lazy, but I’m lazy about doing things that don’t need to be done. And we everybody does things including me everyday things that don’t need to be done. I just am I don’t tolerate as well as maybe somebody else. It’s irritating, annoying to me. And I’ve had coaching from Dan Sullivan for 20 years now. So one of his things is identify the irritating annoying things and figure out a way to eliminate them. So I’ve resonated with me for For a long time, so let me give an example in my world so I we’ve done well over 3 million doctor’s visits, surgeries here in Phoenix in all our five centers in surgery center. So I know the delivery of healthcare pretty well after 3 million of those. And some are virtual summer in office and majority are in office for more than virtual now. So I really, I really understand the moving parts to that, what slows it up, what speeds it up what’s necessary, what isn’t what creates value, it doesn’t create value at a very nuanced level. And I like that nuance level. I like engineering, the process. And so, one of the things that irritating, annoys everybody is is to speak about dominos, is copays, right? Deductibles like there isn’t. There isn’t a purchaser or user that appreciates a copay that appreciates a copay. So we ask the question, why is it even exist? So I have dissected the healthcare delivery process into hundreds and hundreds of parts but in in those parts are dominoes in the copay is one of those dominoes meaning that it’s not a domino if I add something and knocks everything down, it’s like if I take it away what else goes with it? What else just gets sucked away with that domino. So this is I could list 30 of them for you. But let’s just pick copays because everybody knows what a copay is that $10, 25, $50 charge you pay your doctor when you go. But if we get rid of the copay, meaning it’s zero dollars. What else goes with it? Do you need a cash drawer anymore? Do you need checks? Do you need a merchant account for the credit card? The merchant account to take credit cards? Do you need those? They all go when they go away? Well, do you even need to send a statement out if the bill is zero? No. And there’s these things called explanation of benefits your insurance company pays you send you that tells you this is not a bill but it sure looks like one and it confuses everybody. Right. Right. But even before that went out, somebody had to process In a computer, somebody had to put a folder and put it in an envelope and lick the stamp. Well, that goes away. If the EOB goes away, because a copay went away, all that stuff goes away. And the billing department goes away that customer service when you don’t understand your EOB, or your statement, you call me I gotta pay somebody to answer the phone and say, Hey, Dan, don’t worry about it, here’s what it means. Those are all expense. Those are all expenses that that limit art that create no value for you as the user and no value for the purchaser, if that’s your employer. So the copays and deductibles and all the administration that was attached to it and billing and and it all went away. And probably that represents about 40% of the cost in healthcare right there. For the type of healthcare I do. I’m not talking about brain surgeries and you know, major surgeries. I’m talking about the routine, everyday care that people need their primary care there, chiropractors or labs or annual physicals. You get rid of the copays in deductibles and the administration goes with it and the coding and the computer systems that people have the oversight and the stamp that need to be licked and the people have to answer the phones to explain it, you easily get rid of 40% of the cost for that one move. So we did that.

To the untrained eye, it's hard to see the difference between laziness and massive efficiency. - David Berg Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 11:15

Think about that, as you’re listening or watching right now, would it be worth to eliminate 40% of those costs and then be have that passed down to your company’s bottom line to your employees? Bottom line? How does that change the game and give them greater certainty? Keep more money in their pocket, keep them where they’re not freaking out. I mean, like one of the common reasons people go bankrupt today is because of, you know, exponential healthcare costs, medical emergencies. But what if you could help be a relief source for for something like that? Now, David, you you have a fascinating look at healthcare and you I think you call it everyday healthcare, and then the other type of healthcare speak to that a little bit in how you have created these couple buckets and how it creates even more efficiency in the process.

David Berg 11:58

Gotcha. So usually what happens In America, and I grew up in Canada, so it’s different there. So when I moved here 25 years ago, I had to I had to figure it out. And so I looked at it to study it to figure it out. There are a lot of things didn’t make sense. And but you just had to take it, whether it was your team’s annoying, it just it didn’t make sense. It made the math not work even. And it was quite confusing to me that people would tolerate it. And I was perplexing it because I just assumed America was better. That’s why I was coming here. Right. And so it didn’t make sense to me. But one of the things that didn’t make sense to me is how these large insurance companies and now it’s hospitals, insurance companies are working together, how they would control the rules and the data and the expenses, and the services around all these really low cost things that happen very frequently, but then they would put barriers in the way to make it harder to get them and create costs in double, triple quadruple 10. Next, the cost on these very frequent things. Also, they can control it seemed like so they can control the funneling into more expensive things. So that seemed like an obvious problem for me that there was unnecessary irritation and annoyance and complexity being added to the system that I had to participate in. So I’m a big fan of mental modeling, in thinking about my thinking before I actually do it. So when a lot of times I’ll say I did something, I really just thought it 100 times, or I thought about different variables 100 times. And it’s not always clear what I did and what I’ve just thought through. But I modeled out like, what would it look like if the insurance companies in the hospitals and the drug companies, they only participated in that expensive stuff, catastrophic Lee expensive stuff? That happened very rarely, what if that’s all they participated in? How does that change the dynamics of it, right? participate in the rules of the other things 90% the first 99% What if they didn’t even get the get the data for it? What if they didn’t set rules when they What if they didn’t even sell it? That was the thought. And I first applied to my own business. And what I noticed as soon as I did that one move, I lost 30% of the cost, which gave me a huge business advantage that was back 2008. And so today, we separate it, the first separation is so important, and we will, I can never see myself violating this one. We call it everyday care, all the stuff that people have, but the primary care that chiropractic, the navigation through this, we’ve added services with all the money we freed up, we add new services, including all the virtual stuff that’s common today, that wasn’t so much 10, 11 years ago. But the ability to proactively and efficiently communicate back and forth. So it’s not an encounter. It’s a it’s a relationship in the everyday people bucket in totally separate it from the hospital and catastrophic bucket if you will, those are important things, but we’re not going to let them be at the center of because they happen so rarely, right? You happen rarely, they need a different set of skills. Right? So when something’s happening all the time, the main set of skills and the optimization needs to be towards speed and responsiveness. And easy and affordable. Right? That’s the optimization of the everyday care, the first 90 call it 95, maybe 99% of it, right last little bit where we want to optimize for it. Let’s, let’s let’s be perfect here, because we got we’re doing brain surgery, or we’re doing a heart surgery, or we got a appendix these come out, or there’s a baby coming out, right, let’s be, let’s be really, really diligent about being perfect in this small percentage of the time. So we work perfect so we can be more on top of things attention to detail. And let’s slow the world down and make sure you’re making the right decisions. But over here, let’s speed the world up. Let’s make it easy. Get your you’re wondering about that rash let’s make it so you can get it taken care of right now and close the loop Let’s not make you make an appointment and have an appointment Three weeks later which is the average time it takes see a primary care doctor in America today and then when you go there you gotta you got to wait half an hour for your appointment and then you go in there you got to wait 10 minutes wait for the doctors have come in for five minutes to say hey here Yeah, just for cortisone cream on it. Like Come on. Now let’s just close the loop the moment you have the thought and let’s do it really inexpensive. let’s eliminate the need for that brick and mortar visit let’s eliminate the need for somebody to take your scheduling call. let’s eliminate the need for something take your copay eliminate the need for somebody to send in the claim to your insurance company. let’s eliminate the need for you to get an EOB explanation of benefit and eliminate need for you to call somebody and eliminate need for that somebody to pay that person. Take your call. Let’s just eliminate those things by being smart up front.

Dan Kuschell 16:57

Being smart up front You’re getting a perspective to see how his smart up front can help you, you’re getting a glimpse inside the genius mind of day, Dr. David Berg and what he does and how he looks at it and how he can help your company, help your employees help your staff have more certainty, more security, more freedom, free up expenses for your business to allow you to have a smart advantage. So we’re not going to close the loop right now, by the way, we’re going to open the loop right now. Why? Because when we come back, we’re going to take a deeper dive with David, we’re going to talk about some of the misconceptions in healthcare, some of the hidden costs. I’m going to talk about a walk through Genius Network’s office at lunchtime, or you open up this app and showed proof of how certain expenses that you probably aren’t aware of, or 10 to one, and how you can save money immediately and help your team save money immediately. That and a whole lot more coming up with Dr. David Berg on growthtofreedom.com, right after this.

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com. Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall and growing your business? Well, let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation you do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com. That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free small business toolkit you can get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com. That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com. If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com.

Welcome back to growthtofreedom.com. Now by the way, I expect that you got a lot out of that first segment with Dr. David Berg and how He views the world in a different way. Yes, exponential growth can be gotten by, you know, making moves to create 20% of the activity create 80% more results. But what if you could do that in reverse and pull the things out that are just in fiction and also improve things up to 80%? Well, that’s a lot of what you heard in the first segment of the episode By the way, you want to grab a piece of paper you want to grab a pen, I encourage you to do that if you want to come back to this episode you can go to growthtofreedom.com/285. That’s growthtofreedom.com/285. If you never want to miss an episode, go to growthtofreedom.com/subscribe. Now David, I want to I want to dive in at the break we were talking about, you know, five dimensions we were talking about, you know, how you see, you know, down the road, the vision of things and yet being able to make it usable for everyday people. What do you think is the biggest thing holding most people up from you know, when you offer your Healthcare now and I’ll give one example. I don’t know if you remember, this is probably I don’t know, four or five years ago, we were walking, it was at a break at Genius Network. And I forget what even stimulate but you and I were walking down the stairs at Genius Network and Joe’s office and you know how much of a freak show it is at Joe’s office and we come downstairs, we’re in the lunch line and you open up this app, and you start showing me prices. And I and I forget maybe it was me and a couple other people. You started showing prices for something as simple as prescriptions. And you were showing how like literally everyday prescriptions you were you zip through like four or five in a matter of seconds, but like there were a couple like the normal price that like you could get them for like $4 and then the charge at most places like the height I won’t mention names, but in normal everyday places that people will go pick up their purse to be like $400 billing up to 100 times cost, right and thinking about like the average person if the average person makes $15 and 51% make $15 an hour. How can they afford a $400 purse, I know my mom, God bless her. She’s on like eight or nine different prescriptions, and my dad pays an exorbitant amount of money through the, you know, healthcare system. So speak to that one simple idea right there of like hundred times and like the big misconception or fear that someone might have of making a shift or pivoting to something new with especially they can save this amount of money.

David Berg 21:32

You asked a lot of questions there. Let me address the one point is you hit on fear a few times. Yeah. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last six months or so especially now we’ve got all the political stuff, the protesting that’s going on right now. And, and it just seems to me that we’ve got a huge economy, for fear Yes. The money being made and fears a whole economy around fear. Yep. How do you stop that? Like you can’t just blame the media, right? They got an economy I got a business and they’re selling what the market wants and the market wants fear, I guess, right there’s an economy around fear and just know that as human beings it’s everywhere every country we must be wired, for fear. We must be wired to look at fear mostly wired to get fear relieved, you must be wired to create fear. I don’t know. But it’s it’s everywhere. And there’s a whole economy around it and same thing exists in healthcare. Same thing exists in the library business. Same thing exist in car mechanic business, it’s just there. So how do you get in front of the economy of fear? I don’t know what I’ve done as I said, Hey, so let me put this out. I never thought of For right now, I benefit from the economy of fear. I turn it into money every single day. But here’s how I do it. I go to the marketplace and I go, Hey, if you work for me versus anybody else, put your name in the hat with the other 10,000 people want to work for me, I’m gonna give you free healthcare, you and your entire family never have to think about it again. Please work for me. Right? So we get thousands of resumes every single month on that. So and I benefit from that because I have the best of the best to pick from. Meaning that if I if somebody gets a job with me, they fought they have beaten at least 100 if not three 400 people for that one job position. Right. So it’s easy to pick people that align with your values that align with your strategy with your vision, it’s easier to run my company. It’s all my companies are easy to run. And we’ve got our healthcare costs. Now we just got 2019 numbers in and we are probably about a fifth of what all the actuaries say we should have spent on a per person basis If it’s less than we paid in 2000 I don’t know 2000 right, we didn’t spend this little on healthcare. I incredible benefits. There’s it’s not even believable what we’re doing. But it’s all and so as much as we have eliminated the waste and the unnecessary spending, and we’ve created strategies to help our business, that fear’s in there for people want to work for Redirect Health because they’re afraid to work somewhere else, and we, we benefit from it. So that’s what’s happening at every hospital, every pharmacy on the corner, every insurance company, every political party, right? So it’s just it’s a matter of navigating that economy of fear and alleviating fear in some place and, and taking advantage of it. So that’s the first thing that struck me is I’ve been thinking a lot about that common fear but I can’t remember your other questions.

There's an economy around fear, and just know that as human beings, it's everywhere. - David Berg Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 24:54

So you know, the other thing that ties in right with this economy of fear David, You know, related to the move, you call it the move before the move,

David Berg 25:05

The move before the winning move.

Dan Kuschell 25:06

That’s right. And, like, essentially everything we’ve been talking about even what you just brought up about, how you look at a problem, right? How we all I mean, at the end of the day in business, right? What do we do we solve problems, right? And where there’s pain and anxiety and fear, there’s opportunity at the end of the day, and it’s just how you choose to show up. You know, some people could say, and I’m going to say what I’m going to say right, you can choose to endorse it or not based in the role you play in in it. But someone say that the traditional healthcare system which is outdated, in my personal opinion, doing best it probably can based on very old, outdated habits, rituals, patterns, right? is exploiting the average person, right? With what they do. So you recognized as I view it, a hole in the market, a problem and you’re coming here and going hey, there’s a new better way. Right. And it’s not understood, just like the Tucker automobile in the early days was not understood by the big three. And they tried, those big three, tried to crush. You know, the Tucker, which was just a movie for me.

David Berg 26:13

I found that movie disturbing for me, I enjoyed it but.

Dan Kuschell 26:16

And I’m sure probably for you even dealing with the healthcare scenario is probably a lot more real than we have time to go into, as well and how you know how big the game is and how big it gets played, that people just don’t know, unless they’re on the frontlines, but here you are offering a better new alternative that’s healthy and saves business money, and saves employees money. Right. So talk about this idea of of the move before the winning move and how, like, we’re kind of moving out of context of just direct healthcare in a second we’ll circle it back and make sure as you’re listening I like would you like to I mean, at the end of the day, would you like to save on your healthcare costs? Would you like to make things easier for your employee would you like your you and your team to eliminate made a lot of waste. And a few minutes, we’re gonna give you a way to how you can connect with David his team to learn more about how you can put this into action how you can take this. But when you meet someone like David, who is transforming a multi billion dollar industry, right, literally. And he started grassroots he isn’t. He isn’t an insurance company first, so to speak. He was a healthcare company first that just looked at and said, there’s just so much waste here. How can we do this better for everybody? Right And out of that problem has come opportunity. So speak to this idea of the win with the move before the winning move, and how all of us can better live in that space to just operate more effectively, more efficiently as you view it.

David Berg 27:44

So the way I think about it is in any business or any game, or sport, there’s a there’s a winning moves. So in chess, the winning move is checkmate. Yep, so everyone’s playing towards checkmate. Everybody’s playing and they might be playing towards, you know, setting up the sequence for checkmate. And the better you are, the more sequences you got to play, but it’s going towards checkmate, that’s where everyone’s going. So it’s there’s a lot of competition for that move. There’s a lot of competition, but maybe there’s a the way I like to frame the move before the winning move, is that position positioning that nobody is gearing towards there’s no competition for that position. But once you’re in that position, you’ve got huge advantage because of your own unique abilities, your own relationship, your own whatever. So that position for me to have a huge advantage might be different is for you in the same game or the same business or the same industry. So the the the move that most opponents so everyone knows what the winning move is like I won’t go into that though. You know, the definition of removed for the winning move, man, what’s the idea that I do With this way, most opponents won’t see it naturally, especially if they if they already have advantage through other experiences, they won’t see that because it’s more unique to you. And it’s it’s so it’s commonly dismissed by everybody else. It’s just commonly dismissed. And so let’s say for instance, the the move before the winning move is, well, let’s separate the everyday care, the 90%, from the expensive stuff that everyone’s afraid of. Right? He’s afraid of the cost of a primary care physician visit, nobody’s afraid of the cost of a $4 drug. We’re all afraid of the cost of a 4000 rd like We’re all afraid of the cost of a $200,000 surgery that I’ve never seen, but I’m sure they I’m told they exist. I’ve never seen one. We’re all afraid of that expensive stuff that that’s going to bankrupt us. But we let that fear then direct what we do for the 90 95% of the stuff we do. So the move before the winning move is, let’s separate the 95% from the fearful stuff. Right now, from that position, it’s a lot easier to when nobody else is trying to do that. Right. And similarly, if everyone else is trying to lower healthcare costs, that’s the winning move, let’s lower healthcare costs. That’s a winning move, everyone’s going towards that. Everybody’s fighting because you lower the healthcare costs for somebody, you lower somebody’s revenue. Right? Every dollar you lower, you lowered somebody else’s revenue. So you got this tension, this fighting. And they you can think it’s free market all day long. But the move before the winning move is let me back the person who wins that are the big hospital systems, the big insurance companies. If I’m a $300 billion annual revenue insurance company, you think little me’s gonna be able to fight that game? Nope. We got a chance. Right? There’s no chance I can be a $300 billion company, and that’s how big they are today. And they’re all publicly traded. So they got like resources on resources on resources. They can lower costs and they will That game at my expense all day long. So what’s the mood for the winning move that they can’t play? Well, how about this? What if we eliminated unnecessary spending? Now they have no way now they don’t have the fear. Now they don’t have the risk. Now they don’t need as much insurance. They they couldn’t even do this move if they wanted, because their game depends on that fear and that risk and that cost. And they lowered enough. So they have a benefit. But what they need more than the lowering of the cost of healthcare, is they need the story that they’re trying to lower it. The story they’re trying to lower healthcare costs is way more valuable to their $300 billion business than actually lowering the the cost. Yes, I’m not playing the game of lowering the costs. I’m playing a game of eliminating unnecessary spent unnecessary administration. Unnecessary co pays unnecessary, unnecessary, unnecessary, because you know, about what’s the what’s the right price for an MRI. You don’t need, Dan.

Dan Kuschell 32:03

It’s too much.

David Berg 32:07

What’s the right price? When you think about what’s the right price? For that MRI? You don’t need

Dan Kuschell 32:12

any price is too much?

David Berg 32:13

Zero is the right. Yeah, yeah. The right price for the MRI, but you could pay $3,000 if you go through the system, you could pay $300 if you do it effectively pay $300 all over the country. But we see people paying $3,000 all the country to so the fair price for an MRI is $300. But the right price for that MRI if you don’t need it to zero, that’s right. Now, when you when you think about it that way, that’s the move before that winning move is not let’s not try to reduce costs and get your even get the fair price. Let’s figure out how we can eliminate the need to get the fair price by eliminating the need for the MRI in the first place. And how do you do that? Well, maybe it’s a Let’s order a $25 X ray, see what a syrup see if that shows us enough. If it doesn’t show us enough. Now let’s move to the MRI Next week or tomorrow, and by the way, when we do move there, let’s only pay $300. Right? But the first move is not try to get it for 300. The first move is, can we get it for zero? Can we not, not need it? Same with medication, the right price for a medication you’ll need is zero. The fair price might be $2 and 15 cents. The normal or rip off price. If you go through your insurance thing might be your $20 copay. On a $2 drug. That’s what I was showing you at Joe’s place. Yeah, if you don’t do it, right, and you’ve got a business that’s got their self insured company set up. Not not well, maybe their consultant is not giving them good advice or giving them great advice for the consultant but not for the business. That $2 in 12 cent drug that under that should cost $2 and 12 cents, but it’s charged $20 now might be charged $200. But every player in healthcare right now understands how To laser focus on your business, if you’ve got that business that’s allowing a $200 charge for that drug, and the industry will get $200 out of your employees, because you don’t even know what’s happening, the transparency. So the move before the winning move is that that move that nobody else is looking at that position that nobody else is looking at looking at. So I just gave it to two big ones. Let’s separate the everyday care from the expensive stuff. Don’t let the expensive stuff control it or even know what’s going on. Put a brick wall there. You need them. But don’t let them be at the center of it. Go use them when you need to. When I need their operating room, I will get it and I’ll pay for it. The fair amount. When I don’t need it, I’ll pay the right amount which is zero. It’s right there amount in the right amount. the right amounts, often zero, fair amounts could be $2 or $300, or 30,000 or $30,000. What matters is get the right amount if it’s zero first A lot of cost just goes away. And also the complexity is attached to it goes away. So that’s, that’s a big, that’s those are some big moves before the winning move.

The move before the winning move is that move that nobody else is looking at. - David Berg Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 35:08

And those are huge. Those are huge. And as you’re listening, as you’re watching right now, like, are you ready to make the move before the winning move? Right? Just one little move, whether you bucket your expenses into the catastrophic and everyday care, or set it up so that you’re eliminating unnecessary costs and the preferred cost is zero when you don’t need it, right? Why pay for it when you don’t need it? How many of us have been paying for insurance that we don’t really use or need, but then when we need it, we have it. What Dave and his solution gives you is the ability to cover yourself on both sides of the fence. It’s almost like in stocks. Now here’s protected when it goes up protected when it goes down. And that’s what Dave’s method gives you the ability to do a survey.

David Berg 35:55

One other thing I want to just double click on is another move for the winning move. That’s going to It will not appreciate me to some of my peers right now for saying this, but you cannot let doctors be in charge of healthcare. It won’t work. So, healthcare is such a complex system right now you do need, we need system thinkers, we need system thinking. Meaning that there’s components, there’s assets, there’s processes all over the place, and there’s relationships and work arounds and so much stuff that’s happening, that it’s about the entire system. It’s not It’s not about a linear process at all. Yep. If we don’t have system thinking in it, you’re going to spend a lot of money and you’re not going to get the care you need. And especially now around with this is COVID era, just post we’re in the middle of it still. There’s never been a time where system thinking was needed more and wasn’t really applied.

Dan Kuschell 36:56

Right. And I think that what you just said is so profound. Repeat repeat it again. Don’t let.

David Berg 37:04

Don’t let what so give me a Don’t let doctors or don’t let doctors. Yeah, doctors do not have the capability to do the system thinking that’s required today. That’s different than what was required 10 years ago. Yep. You didn’t need system thinking 10 years ago. So it made sense for doctors have a lot more control over what’s happening today. They don’t have it. They weren’t trained for it. They weren’t selected for it to go through their training system thinkers do not go through healthcare training, do not go through medical training, because medical training is about you do this, then you do this don’t make mistake and right but let me let me just kind of what I explained system thinking a little bit more and I’ll use the analogy of a of a spiderweb if I can, and I want to get off of healthcare so it can be applied everywhere. If I can healthcare people tend to go well it’s just healthcare and it’s just Dave. I’m going to apply to a spiderweb so it can go anywhere. This this thought that I want to get out there. A spider web is a system. It’s a system to serve the spider. And it’s a system to specifically make sure the spider gets fed, right? Correct. Yep, the whole system. Now in that system, there’s process process that starts all the way at the level of the DNA and the spider has to create the through the RNA has to create the right proteins that have to be put into the spiderweb. To make the spiderweb work, make it sticky, make it strong, all this stuff needs to do. Well, the whole system around just that, but also the other end, the spider has to eat it. So it means that the DNA has to create the right proteins and the saliva or whatever spiders have to be able to digest the bug it creates. Plus, there’s also a process for wrapping up the spider. There’s a process for figuring out where to put the web so that it can tolerate the wind of the day. Right. It doesn’t end all the things that go into this system for feeding the spider, the who and the And the purpose in the in Who? Yep, eating the who is the spider? healthcare is the same thing. So let’s go back to spiderweb. So any one of those strands if they broke spider webs, great, but enough break, it collapses. Yep, that spider doesn’t need anymore until it restarts. it collapses, it implodes. So what does that spider do? Does that spider walk around and see a spot on the spider web that’s getting a little weak or even is broken and say, Well, I don’t think this one’s going to matter. So I’m just gonna leave it move on to the next and then move on the next move until they see like something that appears catastrophic. In a in a in a normal system. You can do that because you can measure it and you can do the likelihood when you get a very complex system you cannot tell that spider cannot tell which break needs to be fixed and which ones don’t. So the they eliminate the need to make that evaluation the move before The winning move for the spider in their their complex system is, I’m not going to make the evaluation whether it needs to be fixed, I’m just going to fix all of them. I’m just going to fix them all when they’re small, and fix them all, when they’re big, I’m going to right there. And by doing that, that complex system is continually being repaired. And every time something happens, this they have a repair, this spider is going to learn from it. Or maybe it was in the wrong spot, and the wind caught it or right, whatever. But any complex system needs to continually have that continual fixing and learning and cascading of the knowledge around it. Because you cannot predict adequately enough in a complex enough system. What needs to be fixed, what doesn’t what’s going to break it. So the thing that makes that complex system work? Yes, this is the design. Yes, it’s the actual building of it. Yes, it’s the actual maintaining of it. But But really, it’s about the principle of how complex systems work. And there’s all kinds of system theory and this I’m not making this up. This is out there. This is not yet a Berg’s way of thinking about stuff. This is something I like looking at because I see the healthcare system is a very complex system. And we created our own system. Make sure the philosophy made sense. But what makes it work is that we are fixing those little breaks every minute of every day, not knowing which ones mattered. At the same time, we’re sitting back and slowing down the world and go, where’s that domino that if I remove it, so think about those little tiny fixes in healthcare are part of what we do every single day. And when I even try to describe it to people inside my organization, how important these little fixes are these hundred fixes a day. They don’t see it. It’s such a winning move before the winning move that even the people benefiting from it do not see yet value of this. And it’s much easier to get people to fix these little tiny things and to hire people to fix these little things. than it is to convince somebody to be a great healthcare consumer. I started in 2008. I started for about three years I was trying to I was just trying to pound it make all my people, our employees and my friends, employees, great healthcare consumers. What a losing game that is. That’s what I that was a winning move. Everyone said, the move before the winning move was let’s eliminate the need for anybody to become or be a great healthcare consumer. Let’s just create a do it for you model. Now. What we discover is we can do it for you at about a 10th of the cost is I can train you to do it yourself. It’s why would you and you don’t want to do it’s irritating, annoying to do it on your own. So that was a big move for us probably about 2011 is when we said no no more training people how to do it, we’re going to do for you or we’re not going to do it. That’s right. And the cost is plummeted when we did that.

Dan Kuschell 42:53

10% think about that as you’re listening or watching right now. What if you can eliminate your costs on healthcare healthcare related services? By 90%, right? And literally the cost would only be 10% of what you’re doing now, how would that shift the game for you? And if even if it’s half 50% 60% less, compared to 90%? Less? I mean, how would that transform your business, put more money in your butt and allow you to do what David’s done, hire employees, full healthcare benefits paid, and free to them and their families, and have a waiting list of the best talent in your area and the world potentially wanting to work for you, Dave? I mean, you’ve given us so so much. And you know, one thing I leave as you’re listening right now, as you’re watching right now from David, now, I’ve got multiple pages of notes here. The last idea is innovate your spiderweb always be innovating your spiderweb. Otherwise, it just might implode. It just might collapse. And we see this around us every single day. There’s those companies who stay innovating and irritated oyster becomes a pearl. Right? If you stay on top of your game and always look at how can you make the spider Web, your spider web, your business, your team better every single day. Where can people go Dave to learn more about you what you’re up to how you can help them get all these savings put in place in their business or to get access to learning how your healthcare model can work for their company.

David Berg 44:17

The first place is going to RedirectHealth.com. Just like it sounds. My email address is David.Berg, BERG like iceberg, @redirecthealth.com, that’s the easiest place to start. And then everybody’s got slightly different needs. And we’ve got some stuff on there for individuals. We got some stuff in there for small businesses. Also now for some for large self insured companies. We got a lot of those folks coming to us now. The words out there that you don’t have to spend the kind of money that you’re spending for so that’s that’s new. I mean, that’s not new, or that’s that’s new knowledge today that didn’t exist five years ago, right? Five years ago, there are a lot more companies and people and CEOs, founders of companies that are saying I just got to do It’s a necessary evil, check the box hands up somebody else. What we’re seeing now is CEOs are not doing that just even big organizations, huge organizations are going to know that this is the CEOs job. This is too big a line item now. And I suspect there I’d love to listen to some of the conversation to the HR managers and CFOs used to do this and now that CEO is taking it back. Yeah, I took it back in 2007. I said no, I’m in charge of healthcare now in our company because this this is going the wrong way. The math doesn’t work.

Dan Kuschell 45:29

Yeah, I mean, as you think about your profit loss statements, your balance sheets, you know, chances are payroll is one of your highest expenses, if not the highest it is behind that is your medical care. Well, what if you could eliminate the waste to create an exponential return? attract the best keep the best I mean, is retaining good talent important to you? Would you like to be the only company they would want to work for short term and long term because you have in applying the smart advantage If you’re looking for a smarter, better way, a new way to re engineer your healthcare model to save you money at the end of the day, bottom line, you’re going to save money in your business. In most cases, again, put an asterisk there.

David Berg 46:11

One things we do with all our clients too is we make sure that they’re not just looking at their healthcare. Most businesses look at their healthcare costs, is just the premium they pay every month, their portion of it, they don’t look at their employees portion of it. They don’t look out of pockets for co pays and deductibles. They don’t know what they are. What we encourage them to do is and some companies say, Well, I don’t offer healthcare, so I have no costs. Look at me, aren’t I great? Well, then it’s so easy to look at their workers comp costs that are now higher because they don’t have healthcare. Yep, recruiting costs are higher because they don’t have a value proposition that is different that differentiates them. They can’t keep them it’s easy for their competitors to poach their employees. So their retention costs and turnover costs are high. And their people when they have to see doctors have to miss work so their absenteeism is high. So when we so we’ve created a tool for our clients, Where we help them quantify their healthcare costs theirs in their employees, their absenteeism costs or workers comp costs, their turnover costs or retention costs. And we said, let’s look at this in a rolling five year forward, so that we can hold ourselves accountable to lowering all these costs. I love it when we do that with business owners because it’s it, that’s when $50,000 savings in healthcare can turn into a $500,000 savings, right to the bottom line, and then we help them measure it going forward. If I could be only in that business, I would. That’s the most fun part about my work is just as is working with the companies that five year forward. And just getting them to think about healthcare not as an expense but as a means to lower the other costs in their business. Recruiting retention, workers comp absenteeism greater than the cost of the healthcare they just gave to their employees for free. And I mean that that’s the strategy that exists. be the most right now we’re doing a lot of that

Dan Kuschell 48:02

and if you want to turn healthcare into an exponential outcome for you and all these areas David just mentioned it’s real easy go check out what they’re doing at RedirectHealth.com. That’s RedirectHealth.com. If you want to connect with David personally reach out to him at [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. By the way, we’ll have all the notes all the links all the resources we talked about in the show notes for today’s show, you can come back to this episode at growthtofreedom.com/285. That’s growthtofreedom.com/285. David, what is that as we leave this what action steps would you encourage our viewers our listeners to take as a result of our time today?

David Berg 48:47

Man I hate thinking about action first. Can I talk about I want them thinking about some? I want them just that’s an action step. Okay, there we go. I want them not acting. just slow down and just think for yourself. And so often what we do as business owners is we, we want to think about the widget we’re creating or the service we’re doing. And and we think that’s what we do as we should be doing what we love doing. It’s why we’re doing business, just back up a little bit and just think about something a move before that can help that widget, factory or that service you want to provide. And then just think for yourself, it’s so easy to hand stuff off to experts. The challenge in healthcare, but also other places, is the experts are not aligned with business owners financially, the incentives aren’t aligned, but doesn’t mean we don’t need experts. But let’s use experts for their knowledge, but not for their thinking. Make the decision yourself, use the experts for the knowledge for their opinions. use multiple experts for their knowledge, in their opinion, they might be the same knowledge, same opinion, but then make the decision yourself. And my experience has been that if somebody can figure out a relatively complex system of a business, you can create This part out as soon as you choose to let this be part of the process of running your business is fixing every little spider web break you see, just just go fix it. This is one of them. You cannot trust the experts in healthcare and many other places in the vendors have your business to think for you to decide for you don’t do it. Do not trust them. You can think every entrepreneur I’ve met can think out think any of the vendors or the brokers, the insurance companies, if they chose to do it. There’s a huge benefit in just figuring out to make it make it make sense yourself.

Let's use experts for their knowledge, but not for their thinking. Make the decision yourself. - David Berg Click To Tweet

Dan Kuschell 50:38

There you have it. He’s David Berg, I encourage you go check out what David is doing. Go to RedirectHealth.com. If you want to connect with David, [email protected], I encourage you, you can go find his book. This is the original version, Fighting Healthcare: Making Healthcare a Smart Advantage for Your Business. Find a way to get your hands on this some amazing info including his health plan scorecard, which is an amazing tool. And so I believe you’re on volume three now is that right? Coming up and

David Berg 51:08

I would encourage people to if they would like to see the the volume the version two, to reach out to me and I’ll make sure that somebody sent you the link to it. It might be off the new website, because there is a version three coming out soon, and I’m toying with do I want a version three? Or do I want a new version one? It’s because I met a transition myself where I don’t like the concept of fighting anymore because we solved it. There’s no right. The fight is over. Like, I don’t want to have “Fighting Healthcare” as a title of of what I’m doing today. Because the fight is over. Yep, it is over we don’t fight anymore because we know the pathway to victory. Every time we can predict it every time there’s no fight. Now a lot of people are fighting because they don’t know it. But so I’m toying with a new version one that I don’t know the title but won’t have the word fight in it, because who wants to be invited to a fight? That’s right. I would invite you to not have to fight dance.

Dan Kuschell 52:09

Well, guess what? You don’t have to fight for your healthcare,

David Berg 52:12

the fights, but one just cuts right. I’ll send you and we’ll watch the results. Right. You don’t have to fight anymore. Now, there’s a lot of folks out there still trying to fight. And that’s that fear economy. And I was I’ve been part of it many times, and I’m part of it today. And it’s hard not to be part of the fear economy. But I don’t want to be part of the fear economy. Fighting is a fear word, right? Why would you fight if you didn’t have something to fight against? And there’s fear? So my you know, Dave Berg’s new thinking is around stop fighting. It’s over. let’s eliminate

Dan Kuschell 52:43

right. So I’m gonna rewrite David’s title right now. It’s called your champion in healthcare, that’s RedirectHealth.com

Dan Kuschell 52:54

Hook up with David. He and their company can definitely help you look at how you can save in all these As he’s talked about today, David, it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show. Finally, we’ve been talking about this for a couple of years. So I’m glad we were able to finally connect my friend.

David Berg 53:10

My pleasure,thank you.

Dan Kuschell 53:14

So I want to encourage you take the next step with what David shared, instead of taking, like massive action and running into a wall somewhere. Why don’t you just stop and think and realize you can get control of your healthcare, you probably have the power to make better decisions than a lot of these vendors, partners that you’ve been led to believe are your experts. Rather, what if you took a different approach? And what if you actually reached out to Dave’s company to see like, some of the surprising hidden costs that you could save not only you but your team, your employees, your vendors, your partners even and get this new model into people’s hands all over the world go to RedirectHealth.com. That’s RedirectHealth.com. If you want to reach out to David, go to david.berg@redirecthealth. Thanks for listening If you want to come back to this episode and go to growthtofreedom.com/285. That’s growthtofreedom.com/285. If you never want to miss an episode go to growthtofreedom.com/subscribe. That’s growthtofreedom.com/subscribe, we’ll see you next time on growthtofreedom.com.

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com. Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall and growing your business? Well, let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation you do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com. That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free small business toolkit. You get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com. that’s activate.breakthrough3x.com. If you’d like to Access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com.