00:00 Speaker A
Walk us through the news and and how you intend to put this money to work, Fred.
00:06 Speaker B
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Josh.
00:08 Speaker B
Uh so you know, we’re excited to announce today our Series B round and uh and curative, uh $150 million at a 1.3 billion valuation to really keep scaling our model of employer sponsored health insurance that actually focuses on prevention.
00:24 Speaker B
So we use a combination of engagement um and preventative health to really get our members uh to engage as early as possible, go and take care of themselves.
00:34 Speaker B
And we see that then translate into results. uh about a 30% reduction in inpatient hospital admissions within six months of an employer group moving to uh to the curative model.
00:46 Speaker B
So we’re planning to use this funding to continue uh scaling up. We uh started the health insurance business about three years ago now. um and currently we’re operating in Texas, Florida, and Georgia.
00:57 Speaker B
And we’re planning to use this funding to scale up nationally. So we’ll be starting first in Maryland and DC, but looking to launch in Indiana, Ohio, and hopefully, uh, New York, uh, and then over the next couple of years roll this out nationally.
01:04 Speaker A
You talked Fred here about how AI driven member experience is a big investment area.
01:11 Speaker A
Just walk me through that, uh, a bit more Fred. I mean, what, where do you see the significant automation coming?
01:23 Speaker B
Yeah, I think it’s a really exciting time to be building in the insurance space. Yeah, it’s usually maybe not considered the most exciting uh market, but it’s an incredibly document and interaction heavy industry, right? We, even as a small insurance company, receive 10,000 pages worth of faxes every single day.
01:40 Speaker B
And so historically, you would have these vast uh, you know, office buildings of people manually working through this and that leads to very slow responsiveness for members. You know, it takes a long time to get anything done dealing with an insurance company. And what we’re finding now is if you build from the ground up in the age of AI, you can design those processes to be AI first, so you’re not having people manually reviewing, you know, thousands of pages.
02:02 Speaker B
We can get faster decisions, um and we can really make the entire experience much more user-friendly um and really focus on the product that we’re actually delivering uh to the consumer at the end of the day.
02:13 Speaker A
Fred, it looks like you have, you know, this this zero out of pocket plan. Walk me through that, Fred, just explain that model to me and what are the unit economics at play Fred that sort of make that sustainable.
02:25 Speaker B
Yeah, so there’s I think long been this idea that we have to put in place these barriers to people seeking care, otherwise people will dramatically over utilize. But the the data in the literature has really shown that the the opposite is almost true. That when you put in place these barriers, deductibles, co-pays that are supposed to make people uh good consumers, that they will go and price shop, only get the necessary care. It’s just not not what really happens in reality.
02:54 Speaker B
When you put in place those barriers for people, what happens is they just stop seeking all care. They don’t go do the preventive visit, they don’t go do the screenings, they don’t go get their colonoscopy or their mamogram.
03:04 Speaker B
They put all that stuff off because they want to avoid the out of pocket cost or even the perceived out of pocket cost if it would maybe have been free as a preventative service. Um and they delay and delay and delay until what could have been a simple, straightforward intervention is now becoming a more expensive procedure, an expensive specialty medication or even an impatient hospital stay.
03:28 Speaker B
And so, by creating that financial barrier, what you’re really doing is just kicking the can down the road and saying, well, we won’t spend any money now on prevention, but we’re going to spend a lot more money next year or the year after actually dealing with the consequences of that. And so what we do with curative is we remove those financial barriers. So on day one, our members have no out of pocket cost, no co-pays, no deductibles, no co-insurance.
03:52 Speaker B
They can actually go and get care and they know what it’s going to cost them. And everybody gets that for the first 120 days on the plan.
04:02 Speaker B
And then during that 120 days, they have to come to us and do a preventive health visit, which we call the baseline visit. and as long as they show up and do that preventive health visit just once a year, they get to keep the no out of pocket for the rest of the year. But if they don’t show up, on the 121st day, they go back to a $5,000 deductible, 20% co-insurance and a bunch of co-pays.
04:28 Speaker B
And so we’re able to get 98% of members to actually engage, show up and do that preventive visit. um and that’s really what allows us to drive the effective intervention with those members.
