Bend The Healthcare Trend With Mark Gaunya

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

No matter who you are or where you are in life, you should give kindness freely because leaders know how to adapt and blend with people. Learn and grow your business by being the right kind of leader. Join your host John Livesay as he talks with Mark Gaunya about the healthcare system, his passion for health and well-being, and its exponentially positive cultural and financial impact on businesses and organizations. Mark develops innovative solutions to complex challenges to save clients time and money. He is the Co-author of Bend the Healthcare Trend, a book written to demystify consumer-driven health and wellness plans with client case studies to share theory and show application. He discusses gratitude, learning, insurance and much more. As a leader, we need the inspiration to grow personally and professionally, and this episode boosts that and your leadership mindset.

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Bend The Healthcare Trend With Mark Gaunya

Our guest is Mark Gaunya who is an entrepreneur on a lifelong mission to make healthcare easier and more affordable for everyone. He’s been recognized by the Benefits Pro as a Top 5 Broker of the Year finalist, and the Benefits Adviser as a Top 30 Thought Leader nationally. He develops innovative solutions to complex challenges to save clients time and money.

He’s passionate about consumerism, health and wellbeing, the exponentially positive cultural and financial impact on like-minded businesses. He’s the co-author of Bend the Healthcare Trend, which is a book that helps to demystify consumer-driven health and wellness plans. He is also the co-author of Inspire to Act and Inspire to Act For Kids, which are two books about living with an attitude of gratitude with 100 short stories about paying it forward. I can’t wait to know more about that. Mark, welcome to the show.

[bctt tweet=”Kindness has no age restriction. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

Thank you, John. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you.

Would you take us back to your own story of origin? You can go back to your days when you were at the University of Rhode Island or before that. How did you get interested in wanting to be involved in the healthcare world and insurance in particular?

My story of origin goes back all the way to my parents. My mom and dad were healthcare people. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a physical therapist by training. They were both very passionate about helping people and they are entrepreneurs. They built a company from the ground up. It was outpatient physical therapy. They had six facilities in three different states. After I graduated from the University of Rhode Island, I went to work with them for the first five years of my career. As a kid growing up, I learned all about the health care system, how it works, and how it was designed to help people. I learned how healthcare is delivered to people from the provider side of healthcare.

When I helped my parents sell their company and retire, I decided I wanted to learn how the insurance side of the business works. To be honest, the story was I want to go where the checks are written rather than where you wait to receive income. I went to go work for Blue Cross Blue Shield in Washington DC. That’s where I cut my teeth in the insurance business. I had a guy, my first mentor in the business, who put me into a leadership role with no sales management experience. He saw something in me and gave me an opportunity. Fortunately, I parlayed that into a career in insurance. I did a couple of what I call tours of duty in the insurance business.

I lived in Chicago for a period of time. I worked for Cigna Healthcare out there. I then left Cigna to be part of a startup health insurance company called Destiny Health, which is the expansion of an international organization firm that was based in Johannesburg, South Africa. They’re the ones who were pioneers in the whole notion of consumer-driven healthcare. It’s what we now know as health savings accounts. I moved away from Chicago back to the New England area where I’m originally from and met my now business partner, Jennifer. Through that journey, she and I became business partners in 2005. We run an employee benefits brokerage, consulting firm, and also a regional and national program called Captivated Health for a middle-market organization. The net of it is I’ve worked on the provider side, the consumer and the employer side. I have a 360-degree view of how healthcare works.

Bend The Healthcare Trend: How Consumer-Driven Health and Wellness Plans Lower Insurance Costs

That’s a fascinating perspective. As a child, you had a front-row seat as to how it all worked and what was wrong, and then you decided to get experience in every area of everyone who’s at the table. That’s the way I would describe that.

That’s an accurate way to state that. I’m not a clinician. I never have science in me. I appreciate it. I was not clinically gifted but I am business gifted. The business of health care and decided to learn the business of healthcare from every angle so that I could do something about it in my future years.

Don’t you think that gives you empathy and credibility? When you’ve been in someone’s shoes, it gives you both empathy and credibility. That’s the case for me when I get up in front of sales organizations and speak. I know what it feels like to have quotas, deadlines and to not take rejection personally, and all those things that everyone is struggling with on a day-to-day basis. Suddenly, I know you also speak to the industry. You have so much empathy and credibility because you’ve been there. Before we started the pre-chat, we talked about your friendship starting before your business relationship with Jennifer at Borislow Insurance. Can you tell us a little bit about how that evolved?

Jennifer was on the broker advisory council for an insurance carrier who was looking to do a joint venture with that company, Destiny Health. That council had to approve the transaction and I was the sales leader for that insurance company. The two of us hit it off instantly. The transaction went through and they asked me to head back to New England to head up the strategic partnership. My parents were retired and they were living in Cape Cod. This would give me a chance to be close to them which was a great decision because my mom passed away. I wouldn’t have had that time with her hadn’t I done that.

I met Jennifer and we became very good friends with each other. When I landed here in the Boston area, she was the person I would call and say, “What’s the market saying about my product and service?” She would tell me things that I didn’t necessarily want to hear but I needed to hear them. Truth be told, if I’m being honest about it, she and I are both passionate golfers. We spent a six-hour round in the golf course which is long, in the same cart together. That’s where our friendship was formed. She then tried to recruit me to go work for her. I didn’t have any desire to be employee number fourteen for her. At the time, it was a small benefit firm. We talked about becoming business partners and came together. As I always say to everybody, our business partnership was born out of friendship as opposed to the other way around, which makes it special.

You have a second edition. You told me that you were quite innovative and mailed that out. I’m going to ask you about that in a second. This concept of, “Why is health insurance expensive?” It’s basic because healthcare is expensive. There is a way to give people some power and knowledge. That seems to be the intent of the book. Who’s this book for?

[bctt tweet=”Empathy and credibility are a winning combination.” username=”John_Livesay”]

The book is for employers who are sponsoring health insurance and health benefits for their employees. It’s written for CEOs, CFOs and leaders of HR who are looking for a practical guide to transform their culture into one that educates people. If you look at the healthcare literacy rate in this country, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, it’s 14%. That’s not okay that people are walking around not even understanding the language of healthcare. How are we going to expect them to be educated about making decisions if they can’t even understand the language?

We created this as a practical guide for employers to understand and demystify or debunk a lot of the myths that are promoted in the media or in the healthcare space by the players who designed the healthcare system. When you look at that, you say, “How do we navigate that?” What we did through this book is we created a practical guide that was ten chapters. It shared the theory in each chapter and then it would share a practical case story of a client who benefited and deployed that theory into practical application and what the impact was to their plan.

One of the things you have in your book that I love is this culture of health and wellness. Certain companies will give credit to help encourage people to join a gym and things like that. I’m guessing there are some other things that people can do when they have a company, big or small, to have a better culture for health and wellness.

We believe in the five-element construct of creating a culture of health and wellbeing. It even transcends wellness into overall health and wellbeing. Our five elements are physical, financial, workplace, community, mind and spirit. We look through those elements at any client we work with, and any business can do this and meet your people where they are. You can make progress in each one of those and we call that the whole person concept.

If we think about it, everybody wants to be physically and financially well. They want to understand the purpose of the work they’re doing and are tied to a bigger vision than that of themselves. They want to give back to the community and they need to spend some time taking a breath, meditating, doing yoga or whatever the case might be because life is still very busy. When you wrap all those five things together, you can transform the culture of any organization or elevate a company that’s already focused in those areas, but help their employees and family members ascend to an even higher level of wellbeing.

One of my favorite phrases is, “If it’s not measured, it doesn’t get done. If it’s not scheduled, it doesn’t get done.” We have something in chapter eleven called The Report Card. What is that about?

Healthcare Trend: A manager is somebody you have to follow, and a leader is somebody you choose to follow.

The report card essentially is our way of coming back to measuring the data, so taking a baseline assessment. When we work with a client, the first thing we’ll do is get any data analytics we can get our hands-on. It depends on the size of the employer, but demographic information, claims information, and we’ll do an environmental survey. We’ll go and look at the environment that the employers are working in. Especially with COVID, you see a lot of people are working at home. That environment has been somewhat challenged, but understanding the environment. The third is interests. What are the employees interested in? It’s those three data elements. Financial and data metrics, environment metrics and employee interests that you can then use as your raw material to measure, “What areas do we want to focus on and improve? What does the data tell us? What are the areas where we need to focus and improve?”

You and Jennifer went on to co-author Inspire to Act. You talk about how important a simple act of kindness is. When I speak to sales teams, the old way of selling is ABC, Always Be Closing and coffee is only for closers. I did that with ABK instead of ABC, which is Always Be Kind, starting with the way you talk to yourself. We can’t possibly be kind to our coworkers, let alone clients, if we’re not starting with some kind of internal thoughts ourselves. You collected this wonderful book of which all these stories of how positive connections with people have a direct impact on how we feel about ourselves. Is there a story in Inspired to Act that you want to share?

This idea or this book is born out of our culture of living an attitude of gratitude. We held a holiday party every year for our employees and we decided to shake things up a little bit. What we did was two weeks before our holiday party, we gave everybody $100 with a letter of instruction. At the time, we had twenty employees roughly. We had them go out into the community and do random act or acts of kindness. The only requirement was they had to come back to the holiday party and tell everybody what they did with the money.

The stories, many of them made you tear. One story, in particular, I can remember is one of our employees who went into the hospital emergency room. There was a family, they had a $100 copay at the emergency room and this person was fighting for his life. They didn’t have the money to pay the copay and the hospital was giving them a hard time. Our employee walked in and paid the $100 copay so that the family member could get the care. At that moment in time, he happened to be in the emergency room when something like that happened. It made a real big difference in that person’s life.

I always say when you tug at people’s heartstrings, they open the purse strings. That’s the power of storytelling. You start to imagine yourself in that story and what it would feel like that $100 could cause someone you love to not get the care they need to live. How would you feel if you were in that situation? On the flip side, how great would you feel if you had the money to help them? That’s a great example of that story. Many people say, “I don’t know if I’m a leader.” You have got this great quote in your book from John Quincy Adams, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you’re a leader.” I love that so much because you and Jennifer didn’t have thousands of people working with you when you first started, but yet you were both leaders. Can you speak to aspiring people who want to become leaders?

First of all, Jennifer was one of the kindest people I know on the planet. She shared with me a quote that I’ll never forget when we first started working together, “No one cared about how much you know until they know how much you care.” When she shared that with me, I stopped and looked at her. I’m like, “What makes the two of us a great partner is that’s what we both not only believe but how we behave.” Leaders are somebody that people follow even when they don’t have to. A manager is not that. A manager is somebody you have to follow and listen to. A leader is who you choose to follow and listen to.

Jumping back to your other book, I want to close that open-loop I created. You sent copies at your own expense of that book to whom and to help them understand what they were dealing with because they weren’t healthcare experts. Can you tell that story?

[bctt tweet=”Creating a culture of health and well-being is a must. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

This was back in 2009. I co-authored the book and we were debating the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare at that point in time. I wanted our senators to stop, think and understand how the healthcare system works and from a prescriptive standpoint, how they could understand the principles that would set the foundation to change things for the better for people. I authored a letter and sent it out to all 100 US senators.

Sadly, I only received three thank you notes. Not even one from my home state of Massachusetts. That’s the sad part of the story. I did get three. One from Senator Collins up in Maine. She’s a wonderful human being. She’s become a friend of mine because I do a lot of work in the public policy area. I’m the Legislative Chair for the National Association of Health Underwriters. I get a chance to work with her and other people like that. I got a thank you note from Senator Hatch in Utah who was a very big believer in health savings accounts and consumerism. I also got a thank you note from Senator Inouye in Hawaii. A pretty good geographic dispersion but nobody from my own home state. I’m pretty sure most of them did not take a look at the book. Nonetheless, we made an effort to make a difference there.

We got to acknowledge the people who did send you a thank you, which is great. One of the reasons we’re aligned is the power of kindness and storytelling. I was working with an orthopedic surgeon who has created some new products for his industry and wanted some help on crafting stories to explain that to potential investors and other doctors. He said, “One of the benefits of learning how to become a better storyteller is with my child.” He has a seven-year-old daughter who used to say, “Daddy, tell me a story. Don’t just read me one.” He said, “Honestly, I was a deer in the headlights. I didn’t know how to tell a story until I started working with you. Now, I cannot just use storytelling from my career but with my child.” You and Jennifer took this Inspired to Act and have a new edition for children with the line, “Kindness has no age restriction,” which has got to be one of my all-time favorite quotes. How are people using this with children?

If you think about the whole notion of gratitude, it’s not something you’re born with. You have to be taught how to demonstrate gratitude. We believe that starts at a very young age. I have three children and I had them contribute stories to this but the idea would be, you don’t have to have $100. It doesn’t even have to be about money. How about you opened the door for somebody, or you say please and thank you when you want and get something, or you offer to be there for somebody as a shoulder to cry on when things are not going well? That book was written for kids 6 to 16 so that they can develop that habit of gratitude.

When you develop the habit of gratitude, it then becomes something ingrained in you. As an adult, I still write handwritten thank you notes and I do it every week. I do it because no one receives mail now. Most people don’t or a text. That’s a part of that person. In my case, it’s me. I’m putting a part of me on paper with my handwriting, telling you that you impacted my life in some magical way, or I’m amazed at how you conduct your life or whatever the case might be. That practice gets you out of yourself and focused on other things, which I think many of us get trapped in our heads. I know I do from time to time. That’s why the act of gratitude or meditation has been a huge gift.

That leads to helping children and what you’re doing as a Founding Principal and CEO of Captivated Health with helping schools. Can you tell us how you’re helping schools get control of their health care future?

We created Captivated Health in 2014. We do a lot of work with private schools where you might send your child to what you would be called a prep school. You pay for your child to attend the school. It could be a boarding or day school. We work with over 100 of them all across the country and growing in that space. We had three risk consortiums, three groups of schools that were buying together in their state but not buying together on a national basis. What we did is when Obamacare came into existence, it was going to make it very challenging for those schools to continue to purchase together.

Yours truly had to go and figure out, “How are we going to keep these guys together and help them overcome some of these challenges?” That’s how Captivated Health was born. Ten of our schools decided to be the founders of this program with us. We didn’t build this on our own. We collaborated with our school clients to create a community that was focused on four principles. Those four principles are members first, consumerism, health and wellbeing, and self-governance. If you look at those four principles, it’s table stakes.

The first principle of members first, I ask our team all the time, always ask yourself this question before you come in and advance an idea, “If you are a member of this health plan, would you want whatever it is you’re about to tell me?” If the answer is no, then please don’t bring it forward even if you know it will save us money. Principals and consumers, and everybody in the program, the employers offer a health savings account, which these plans have been beaten up by the media that they’re high deductible. Who wants to buy a high deductible plan? Nobody does. Who wants to buy a lower premium plan? Everyone will raise their hand. The idea of using words to help people understand healthcare.

Healthcare Trend: If we step back from the healthcare system and understand that it wasn’t a system built for the people, we could be aware that we can take control of our future by first acknowledging that.

As I mentioned to you, the literacy rate is 14%. Making sure people understand the language of healthcare is how you help liberate them to make better choices in the future because they understand the language. We use the slogan, “Knowledge is in power,” but if you look at the reflection, “Knowledge is me power.” The third element is creating a culture of health and wellbeing, which you and I already talked about in terms of the five elements. The fourth and final principle is self-governance. These groups and schools are taking the risk of what we call self-insuring the medical expenses of their people. They reinsurance to protect them from any person who might have a bad year or bad illness. They use other protection to give them a little bit of their financial liability but there’s risk involved based on how their plan performs from one year to the next.

What the self-governance principle does is created a set of bylaws. Those bylaws mirror our own US Senate, where it doesn’t matter the size of the school. They have one vote. Our Northern New England schools, their original ten pioneers, were very passionate about this because they said, “As this grows in scope and scale over time and larger schools come into the next, we don’t want our voices to be lost.” They created a structure with a chair and a vice-chair, and then they created four committees. Governance, membership, finance and engagement.

Those committees are staffed with HR and CFO executives who collaborate together in areas of concentration and represent their members. They have an annual meeting of the membership every year we hold in October, where they get together. They share stories of the programs that they’re running and the differences they’re making in the lives of their people. Is saving money and creating margin cuts for all non for profit important? Yes, but it’s not the driving force. The driving force is to make healthcare easier and more affordable for their people and schools.

At the end of the day, everybody wants to feel, be seen, heard and appreciated. Whether you’re managing people, your children or in this case, schools, everyone’s voice is equal regardless of the size. Mark, if people want to reach out to you in any of these areas, whether it’s learning more about gratitude, about how you can help them with their insurance or other schools, what’s the best way?

[bctt tweet=”No one cares about how much you know until they know how much you care.” username=”John_Livesay”]

My personal email address is [email protected], or they could go to our website, www.Borislow.com or in the example I shared with you about our program Captivated Health if they wanted to learn more about that. It’s spelled exactly as it sounds, www.CaptivatedHealth.com.

Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with?

If we step back from the healthcare system and understand that it wasn’t a system built for the people, understand that we can take control of our future by first, acknowledging that. Secondarily, understanding that the key to unlocking our future is to educate our people. We can find the interest of the people in the organization so everybody can get the same or higher quality healthcare at a fraction of the cost. They can reinvest those dollars in other areas to make whatever value proposition they’re providing their area a lot more powerful.

Thanks again, Mark.

Thank you, John.

Important Links

• Bend the Healthcare Trend
• Inspire to Act
• Inspire to Act For Kids
• Borislow Insurance
• Captivated Health
• [email protected]
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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