In the United States, we are privileged to enjoy some of the best medical care in the world. But the system is financially broken–a bipartisan assessment shared across political and ideological lines. In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the phrase “military-industrial complex”. What nobody saw coming was a veritable “medical-industrial complex” whose lobbying dollars now eclipse every other industry. We do not use provocative terms lightly, but the medical industry today operates as a genuine cartel, in which insurance companies and large health systems collude to maintain artificially high prices, all with the help of government regulation.

At Veritas, we pay our providers well and treat them better than the insurance companies do. We cut out the value destroying middlemen of insurance carriers, their lobbyists, and the administrative bloat that invariably follows. We are committed to posting honest and transparent prices for all services offered; what you are quoted is exactly what you pay.

Context

Over the past 50 years, health insurance has transitioned from being a financial safety net for catastrophic bills, to the default way that healthcare is paid for. Health insurance companies are now the customer, but their interests are fundamentally at odds with the interests of the patient. To understand the business model of Veritas, one has to understand the perverse incentives under which the legacy insurance carriers operate. To put  it simply, the cost of healthcare is out of control because every gatekeeper in the legacy healthcare economy wants and needs the price of care to be high. Our business model at Veritas is part of a rapidly swelling direct care revolution that bypasses  those gatekeepers by building direct relationships with the actual buyers of healthcare: employers, healthcare sharing ministries, and the patients themselves.

The Problem

• Health insurance in America operates differently than any other kind of insurance. Traditionally, an insurance carrier (life insurance, home insurance, car insurance…) wants claims to be low, because the spread between the premiums  collected and the claims paid is their profit margin. But  health insurance companies are both heavily regulated and heavily subsidized by the government. Under the Affordable Care Act, the more money the insurance carrier spends on healthcare, the more the government allows them to keep. So the largest “buyers” of healthcare operate under colossal  conflicts of interest in which their business model is now predicated on the necessity of maintaining artificially high bills.
• This has led to a cartel-like environment  in which the the Big Four BUCA carriers (Bluecross, United, Cigna, Aetna) collude with hospital networks to maintain artificially high prices that are 2-10X higher than the real prices that exist naturally in the free market economy, outside the insurance networks. 
• The medical industrial complex that has resulted from these insurance-provider cartels has grown so bloated that it is ripe for disruption. At $4.8 trillion dollars/year, healthcare spending represents almost ⅕ of our GDP. The inflated cartel prices fueling group health plans represent an employer’s second  largest expense line after payroll. On the individual level, medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in America. The status quo is unsustainable.

The Solution

• The solution is an already RAPIDLY growing Direct Care medical economy that bypasses the fraud, waste, and abuse of the legacy insurance economy. This results in dramatic cost savings by eliminating perverse incentives and administrative bloat. 
• The primary providers in this Direct Care economy are DPC (Direct Primary Care) practices, independent surgery centers, independent surgery practices, independent imaging centers, independent pathology labs, etc. By independent we mean non-hospital owned and non-insurance carrier owned. 
• The Primary buyers in the Direct Care economy are: