Science
- Health insurance startup Bind has created a new kind of health plan.
- Getting rid of deductibles and co-insurance, it instead informs members how much they'd expect to pay for a certain doctor's visit, prescription or procedure.
- Bind's "on-demand" approach to healthcare isn't the easiest to comprehend, so here's the slide deck Bind CEO Tony Miller uses to explain it when he's trying to win customers.
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Health insurance startup Bind knows its health plans aren't like others.
Bind was founded in 2016 by Tony Miller, who previously started two companies that he sold to UnitedHealth Group. Bind has raised $70 million from investors including UnitedHealth, Lemhi Ventures (where Miller is a managing partner), and Ascension Ventures, the venture arm of the giant Ascension hospital system
Bind provides health plans for employees who get their insurance through their work, and covers more than 10,000 people.
The health plans Bind offers look a bit different from the insurance that you probably get at work. They're based based on the idea of making it easier to figure out how much your healthcare will cost ahead of time.
To do that, the plans ditch deductibles and co-insurance in favor of fixed amounts you know you'll have to pay before going in for treatment.
Deductibles can require health plan members to pay thousands of dollars for medical care and prescriptions before their health insurance kicks in, while co-insurance requires members to pay a percentage of the total cost of care.
Bind displays information about treatment options and their costs in its app and online, and is hoping that individuals will tend to pick cheaper healthcare options that will provide care that's just as good.
"The insurance doesn't look complicated for consumers at all," Miller, Bind's CEO, told Business Insider.
Even so, the new approach takes some time to get used to.
To help, Bind set up this slide deck to convince employers to sign onto Bind. Some slides have been omitted in the version provided to Business Insider.
