00:00Joining us now is Justin Mares. He's the company's founder and CEO. Justin, great to have you here with us.
00:06I have to ask first ahead of April 15th, right? Are many more people signing up or many more people
00:11paying attention to this as we get to tax day?
00:14Oh, yeah, certainly. I mean, HSAs and FSAs on their own are growing 10 to 12 percent a year for
00:20the last couple of years.
00:20There's around $159 billion in HSAs and FSAs today. And what we are seeing is increasingly millennials and Gen Z
00:28people, they're interested in opening and contributing to these accounts at rates that we've just never seen before.
00:34We recently ran a survey that found that 89 percent of Gen Z and millennials that had access, had the
00:40ability to open an HSA, were opening one and were contributing to that account, which is a pretty novel thing
00:46in terms of this financial behavior.
00:48It's definitely big. And I know a number of younger people are using platforms like yours. What kind of competition
00:54is out there?
00:55I've heard of other products like Dr. B, you know, if somebody needs physical therapy or wants to get a
01:04gym membership paid for by an HSA, they'll go to TruMed or other platforms to do that.
01:09Yeah. So the biggest competition, frankly, is apathy. Like for most of the time that HSAs and FSAs have been
01:16a thing, the average American has not been able to talk to their doctor and have their doctor prescribe a
01:22sleep intervention, an exercise intervention, something like that.
01:25And so what we're really advocating for and what we've built is a tool that makes it easy for qualified
01:31individuals that are trying to treat, reverse or prevent a condition to spend their HSA or FSA funds on things
01:36like, you know, exercise intervention, gym membership, as you mentioned, sleep aid supplements that thousands and thousands of studies have
01:43shown can actually treat or reverse many of the chronic conditions that so many Americans are sick with.
01:48And it makes a lot of sense. Obviously, prevention is key. It's much better than I go to the gym
01:54and work out and my heart's in better shape than I have a heart attack later and end up at
01:58the hospital.
01:58How do you prevent, though, the scammy or supplemental sales, right? These vitamins or powders and pills that people tend
02:10to waste money on?
02:11Yeah. So we have kind of two steps to our process. One, we have a medical advisory board and a
02:16clinical team that will review
02:17sort of the body of evidence and look at, you know, thousands of studies that have been published in multiple
02:22journals, peer-reviewed journals and say, you know, is there a reasonable argument and case study for things like omega
02:29-3 supplementation or creatine or magnesium for sleep?
02:32Like these sorts of things that the literature is frankly very clear on as effective interventions. That's part one. Like
02:38is the compound actually effective?
02:40Part two is we look at the actual merchants and look at the supplements they're selling and we say, is
02:46the dose effective? Is it well-sourced? Has it passed certain cleanliness and other sort of certifications that we look
02:51for?
02:52And frankly, we turn away about 40% of merchants that come to us wanting to work with us because
02:58they don't meet our quality bar or efficacy bar.
03:00What has your interaction been with the IRS? And what has your interaction been like with this administration? Because I
03:07know there was previously a co-founder that worked with you who now has gone to work with this administration.
03:11Yeah. So we started the company when in the Biden administration, you know, HSAs have been a thing for 20
03:16plus years.
03:17Like the explicit purpose of these accounts is so that people can either save money or spend it now to
03:23improve their health.
03:24So that is why we started the company. You know, we've engaged with stakeholders in the administration and at the
03:29IRS just around what we're doing.
03:30But the big movement that you're seeing, regardless of political administration today, is there is this movement towards root cause.
03:37There's a movement towards lifestyle. There's a movement towards let's actually focus on how we make Americans healthy.
03:43And let's focus on a bunch of the things that frankly are just poisoning us and making us one of
03:47the sickest countries in the world, you know, where we have the worst outcomes with the highest amount of spend
03:52of any OECD country.
03:54What about your interaction or have you received any encouragement from health insurance companies?
03:59Because it strikes me that if you do what you're saying, right, you end up also saving money for health
04:05insurance companies by preventing diseases that they later have to treat.
04:08A hundred percent. Health care health insurance really like what we're doing because there's not really a mechanism in today's
04:14health care system where a health insurer feels good or excited about saying, hey, I'm going to cover your gym
04:19membership or something like that.
04:21Like almost like little less than 3% of all health care spend goes towards anything resembling prevention.
04:27And so HSAs and FSAs are this really interesting bucket of funds where it's up to you as a consumer
04:33to decide, hey, do I actually think that my gym membership or this sleep aid is going to help drive
04:39health results for me?
04:40And, you know, we're basically making it easier for individuals to make these health decisions for themselves.
04:45And many, many, like hundreds of millions of Americans, in my view, over the next decade are going to decide
04:50to invest their own HSA FSA dollars in things that look like preventative measures.
Comments