Insurance: An arrangement by contract where one party reimburses another at a rate proportionate to the risk.

Well, we’re taking the risk out of the equation.

Our proprietary platform Know Thyself captures your so-called external determinants of health to predict your health outcomes. We ask you, on a completely private and secure platform, about your family health history (a way of capturing your genetics), your behaviors (how much you exercise, your eating habits, your diet) and socio-economic factors (race, livelihood and where you live).

Once we make our predictions, you have a good idea of what’s going to happen. Once you know what’s going to happen, there’s very little risk.

Which means there’s very little need for health insurance.

Our Founder, Janis Powers, spent her career consulting to the health care industry. She worked mostly for hospital systems in strategic and financial planning. Much of the emphasis was on “maximizing revenue” or getting paid more. Yet the providers didn’t have a good idea, comprehensively, about how much anything cost.

If providers can’t articulate their cost structure, how do they know how much revenue they’ll need to generate a profit?

Put another way, if providers can’t articulate their cost structure, how can they set prices?

And an obsession was born.

Direct-to-consumer pricing is a key element of Longitudinal Health Care’s business model. You can learn more in Janis’s book,  Health Care: Meet the American Dream.

The human genome was sequenced less than 20 years ago, in 2003. Over-the-counter genetic tests have exploded, showing us that we all have preexisting conditions.

Some of us are born with a truly bad genetic lot. We believe it’s our duty as citizens to support those in need. But most people don’t have debilitating diseases in their future just because of a genetic roll-of-the-dice. Myriad factors come into play and we can control more of these factors than we realize.

Health literacy – or making sure we know about our own health and how the health care system works – is essential to the health of all Americans. We are ardent advocates of improving health literacy so more of us can combat the factors that either generate or exacerbate our preexisting conditions.