"Actually, you do."
There wasn't one moment that led me to Unblind Health. There were two.
Over the past year, I found myself in the caregiving seat for someone I love, navigating a health crisis and experiencing healthcare outside the U.S.
Before procedures and tests, I received estimates. I could see what things cost. I could choose whether to use insurance or pay cash. The process was digital, and insurance approvals often came within minutes. Once a claim started, I got text alerts telling me we are at step 1 of 7, then it moved to 2 of 7, step 3 of 7 ...you get the point.
That transparency changed the decisions I made. That transparency ensured we could spend all our energy on the treatment and care being provided to the patient. For larger hospital expenses, I chose to use insurance. For prescriptions and lab tests, I chose to pay cash. That was the right decision for our family, we knew and understood the process, we knew each estimate before any procedure was done and we could plan our finances accordingly.
It wasn't that cash was always better. Or that insurance was always better.
It was that I could see my options and decide.
Then, back home in US, I was standing at a pharmacy counter picking up two prescriptions for my son.
The pharmacist looked up and said, "Did you know your co-pay is $75.11?" Half joking, half exhausted, I asked, "Do I have a choice?"
"Actually, you do."
She checked the cash price and told me "It's $48 if you want to pay cash." I paid cash.
The second prescription rang up at $760 and needed reauthorization from the doctor who had just written it two hours earlier. So I asked again "Do I have a choice on this one?"
"Actually, you do."
She checked with the senior pharmacist and came back with the generic $55.
Twice in ten minutes, a lower price was available and the only reason I knew was because one pharmacist chose to tell me.
That's when the two experiences collided for me. In one, I had information upfront and could make choices around it. In the other, I didn't even know there was a choice until someone happened to tell me.
So I started digging.
What I found surprised me. Much of the healthcare pricing information I was looking for wasn't necessarily secret. A significant amount of it was already required to be public.
The data existed. The connection to the consumer did not. That realization hit another part of my life.
I've been a founder before. I spent years building a business. I have been in the business of helping brands understand consumers. What they needed, how they made decisions, and how businesses could better reach and serve their customers.
I loved building. I loved solving hard problems. But after a health crisis hit so close to home, I didn't want my next chapter to be about solving another business problem.
I wanted to start with the consumer.
And maybe because I had spent so many years thinking about that connection, the disconnect in healthcare was impossible for me to ignore. I'm not a doctor. I'm not an insurance expert. I'm a founder, a parent and a caregiver who has sat on the other side of the healthcare transaction asking two very basic questions:
What does this actually cost?
And do I have a choice?
That's why I'm building Unblind Health.
We're starting with the data making healthcare pricing information that is already available easier for people to access and use. But I don't think that's where this journey ends. Once you can see the information, you can make a choice. You can ask better questions. And those questions may lead to the next problem worth solving. I don't have every answer yet. Unblind Health is a journey for me, too.