Build better healthcare for your parents

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Fair Square Medicare

Our parents are getting older and the healthcare they're getting is terrible. Two years ago, I went home for Thanksgiving and found that my Dad was having difficulty walking. I called his physical therapist, who, after five minutes of trying to avoid my questions about my Dad's health by citing HIPAA regulation, stubbornly told me his walking was "just fine". I was furious.

I had previously co-founded two successful fintech companies (Octane Lending, worth over $1B and Trim, exited to OneMain), and I immediately started thinking about building the "One Medical for Physical Therapy for Seniors" that I wish I could send my Dad to. But there was a core problem: customer acquisition. Every healthcare business focused on seniors has massive customer acquisition costs because seniors are hard to reach, on fixed incomes, and highly skeptical of "new" services. 

I spent the next few weeks reading about how senior healthcare works and came across a disgustingly fascinating problem: how seniors shop for health insurance. Almost every senior enrolls in a government program called Medicare when they turn 65. Medicare was passed into law in 1965 by LBJ as part of the "War on Poverty". Back then, it was all the coverage a senior needed, but 55 years later, healthcare costs are sky-high, and folks need to purchase secondary insurance from a private carrier or face the risk of bankruptcy. And here's the problem: the average senior has 50 options of secondary Medicare coverage, each of which can lead to drastically different health outcomes. Concretely speaking, if you choose the wrong plan, you could die a lot sooner than if you chose the optimal one.

This is where the disgusting part comes in. To figure out which plan out of these 50 is right for them, our parents enlist some of the skummiest, incompetent, and skeezebally businesses on planet earth: Medicare insurance brokerages. The brokerages - the largest of which are eHealth, GoHealth, Selectquote - operate massive call centers that push our parents to sign up for suboptimal plans because they pay higher commission, don't properly vet the plans they recommend to make sure they cover our parents' doctors and drugs, don't answer our parent's questions about their plan after they sign up, and don't reshop their coverage when new plans come on the market every year. These brokerages operate in a huge TAM -  $10B/yr - but they are so bad, they lose half their customers every year.

The incompetence of these brokerages was going to be my opportunity. And the best part? Unlike other senior healthcare businesses, brokerages don't have a customer acquisition problem because if you don't enroll in Medicare when you turn 65, the government makes you pay a fine. Our parents are all but forced to work with them. 

I sent the incorporation docs in to Delaware, and raised money from YC, Slow Ventures, and Amplo. Fair Square Medicare was going to be the the tech-enabled and customer obsessed health insurance brokerage I wish my parents had.

That was two years ago. Since then, Fair Square Medicare has grown revenue 34% month-over-month, and worked with thousands of clients while maintaining an NPS score of 95. We've built online plan enrollment, a portal for our customers where they can see the details of the plans they've enrolled in, and automated reshopping for them, so they're always on the best plan. The quantitative result of this tech is our annual retention rate. While incumbents are losing half their customers every year, we are keeping 96% of them. We are literally 10x better than our competition.

Let's get back to customer acquisition. We are uniquely able to acquire customers because if folks don't enroll in Medicare they pay a fine to the government. The customers we work with love us (NPS score = 95), we know their health conditions because they've given us a list of their prescriptions, and we have an online portal to interact with them. The brokerage was our hack to acquire customers. Our next chapter is to build a 10x healthcare experience for them. 

Should your parents wait at a doctor's office for a check up? No, we'll send a doctor to them. Should they have to remember the exercises their physical therapists showed them a week ago? No, our app on their phone or iPad will use computer vision to make sure they have perfect form whenever they work out. Should our parents who have hypertension, keep a hand-written log of their monthly blood pressure? No, we'll send them a state-of-the-art connected blood pressure monitor that syncs with our app.

We just raised a $15M Series A and are putting together a small team of incredible engineers to build the healthcare experience they wish their parents had. If you want to learn more, grab a time with me here.