Carl Schuessler, founder and managing principal of Mitigate Partners, cannot hide his passion for saving people money on healthcare costs. Mitigate Partners, LLC is a Risk Management, Cost Containment, and Employee Benefits Consulting group made up of a partnership between 29 employee benefit consulting and brokerage firms. Born and raised in Georgia to a stay-at-home mother and OBGYN father, Schuessler had exposure to the healthcare space at a young age. He attended the University of Georgia, what he calls “the Harvard of the South,” and started in pre-med before soon realizing that the sciences were not for him.
Schuessler’s life changed in February 2013 after reading the 2013 Time magazine article, “The Bitter Pill,” a long form piece about the arbitrary reasons America’s healthcare costs are so much higher than the rest of the world’s, and what those costs are doing to working families. The article was later expounded upon to become a bestselling book. At the time, Schuessler was working in the insurance space, and he says, “I read the Time magazine article and I was so frustrated with having to constantly deliver bad news to our clients about rates, insurance premiums going up and up and up, making the benefits worse and worse every year, you know, pay more get less. And I started to read that and went, ‘wow, you know, there is something behind these curtains that a lot of people don’t know about.’”
“Healthcare isn’t broken. It was made this way intentionally… We just want to bring meaningful change in employee benefits, predominately towards health insurance, and improve people’s lives.”
After that, he decided to start Mitigate Partners, LLC. The firm built the FairCo$t Health Plan, which customizes corporate health plans to mitigate unnecessary costs. Schuessler says that the big insurance companies build healthcare plans with many misaligned interests for their benefit rather than working with employers to build plans tailored to their needs and their employees’ needs. “We eliminate the middlemen,” says Schuessler. Mitigate Partners has a relationship with Health Rosetta, a collaboration and open-source blueprint for better health benefits that seeks to save costs for employers. Schuessler states, “This is all about basically helping our clients be better fiduciaries and stewards of their money, and building a health plan that is centered around the patient. Right now the patient is not in the center of the healthcare system, and that’s the problem.”
Read the full article here → Mitigate Partners Seeks to Make Sense of Healthcare Costs—and Reduce Them
