A refresher course on what self-insured really means

A refresher course on what self-insured really means


Hello. Dr. Keith Smith with you on behalf of the Free Market Medical Association.

This video is really intended for physicians out there who may need a little refresher on what we’re talking about when we say ‘self-funding’ or the ‘self-insured.’

There are companies – usually larger companies of 100 or more employees typically – who have rejected the entire scam of insurance. And rather, they take the risk themselves in paying for their employees’ healthcare out of operational revenue.

That means they do not buy insurance and have someone else take the risk (and usually all the money). Rather, they basically act as their own insurance company and that’s why it’s called self-insurance.

Companies that do this typically buy a big catastrophic backstop policy in case things really go wrong, but the company taking a significant amount of risk themselves means the purchase of the backstop policy, which is called stop-loss, is actually very reasonably priced.

You can imagine how much more reasonably priced the stop-loss carriers are when they find out that employers that are self-funded have contracted with facilities like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma and all of the members of the Free Market Medical Association who have embraced the wisdom of the free market.

The risk that the self-insured employers have taken on by contracting with honest, transparently-priced facilities is much, much less. And so the likelihood that the backstop policy – the catastrophic stop-loss policy – has to actually pay anything is much lessened. That means the rates go down. That means self-insurance becomes even more affordable for those companies that have 100 employees. That means self-insurance is actually a great option for companies with even less than 100 employees.

Here at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, I have 42 employees and we are self-funded. This has been a very smart move for us and has saved us a lot of money by not participating in the scam that people in the United States refer to as ‘health insurance.’

I wanted to give you a little bit of a brush-up on what is self-funding and what self-insurance really is because it’s really significant piece of the healthcare equation in the United States. 60% of all healthcare claims are paid by self-funded companies when you take the Government, and the extent to which it has interfered with healthcare, out of the equation.

That’s a huge market for physicians or facilities who decide that they want to work and bill and charge for what they do in an honest, non-price-gouging way.

Hopefully this refresher will help you prior to your attendance at the Free Market Medical Association Conference next month. We are very excited about that and you will hear a lot of talk about self-funding from people in the self-funded industry and I thought this refresher might be helpful to you prior to the conference.

Thank you for joining me. We hope to see you all at the conference next month.