Risk & Resolve
The Risk & Resolve Podcast is your go-to resource for insightful conversations at the intersection of leadership, business ownership, and the insurance industry. Hosted by Ben Conner and Todd Hufford, this podcast dives deep into the challenges and opportunities that leaders face in an ever-changing world.
Each episode features candid discussions with business owners, industry experts, and thought leaders, exploring topics like innovation, risk management, and the strategies that drive success. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, executive, or insurance professional, you’ll gain actionable insights and inspiration to navigate today’s complex business landscape.
Tune in to Risk & Resolve—where leadership meets resilience.
Risk & Resolve
Sonja Allen - NextGen Healthcare Summit 2025 Recording Series
The Marshall Allen Project preserves the legacy of investigative healthcare reporter Marshall Allen through an AI clone trained with his expertise to help Americans navigate medical debt. Founded by his widow after his sudden passing, the nonprofit organization aims to give 100 million Americans struggling with healthcare costs the tools to make better decisions and fight unfair billing practices.
• Marshall Allen spent 18 years investigating healthcare from the patient perspective before his death in May
• The MAC (Marshall Allen Clone) contains knowledge from 475 articles, books, podcasts and speaking notes
• One in six Americans has medical debt in collections, making healthcare costs their #1 financial concern
• The AI tool provides practical guidance on negotiating bills, finding fair pricing, and writing appeals
• Available in 115 languages to serve non-English speaking communities
• Victory Stories newsletter shares real examples of people who successfully fought medical bills
• Accredited educational curriculum available for brokers (NABIP) and HR professionals (SHRM)
• In 106 documented cases, Marshall helped individuals save an average of $15,000 each
• The foundation aims to save Americans over $10 million in its first year
Visit the Marshall Allen Project website to access the MAC and learn how to fight unfair medical bills and win.
You're listening to Risk and Resolve. And now for your hosts, ben Conner and Todd Hufford. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you, and grateful to Ben Conner for the opportunity to share with you all today. My late husband, marshall Allen, passed away in May very suddenly from a heart attack.
Speaker 1:Marshall was an investigative healthcare reporter for the last 18 years of his career. His focus when he was writing a story was to look at healthcare from the perspective of the patient. He wanted to help people understand and advocate for themselves in all of their healthcare encounters. The way that our system works now is that when someone goes to the doctor, they try and find somebody first in network. They, you know you go to the doctor. They try and find somebody first in network they, you know. You go to the doctor, you schedule the needed appointment, you come home and then you get the bill in the mail. Generally in the past you would look over the bill, you would make sure that it was an amount you could afford and you would send in the payment. But now the out-of-pocket costs are increasing, the coverage is limited and the price of health care is soaring. This leads us to our current reality we have 100 million Americans with medical debt. One in six Americans has medical debt in collections. Americans now say that paying for health care is their number one financial concern. Health care is their number one financial concern.
Speaker 1:Marshall set out to investigate the high cost of health care and he uncovered many backdoor deals and agreements that are not in the patient's best interest. He called for transparency in a system that operates by keeping things complicated and opaque for the consumer. He wrote about solutions to help people learn what their options were, what questions they can ask to get the help that they need and what resources are available to help them navigate. In 2021, he published his book Never Pay the First Bill and Other Ways to Fight the Healthcare System and Win. He loved the last part of that rather long title and win. People can be empowered with information and tools so that they don't feel powerless. They can access the information to help them make informed decisions and advocate for themselves and their families against the high cost of care. This education is aimed at the consumer, the individual. Until the individual goes to the doctor or hospital, until they know what their rights are and where to get the information they need to make those kind of informed decisions, they will continue to be victimized by the system.
Speaker 1:About a month before Marshall passed away, he found an AI program where he could clone himself, not on a cellular level, but just in his healthcare brain. He was able to download his entire healthcare knowledge into the clone. He uploaded 475 articles of his book, his podcast, his speaking notes. Anything that he had contributed to healthcare and healthcare education was programmed into the clone. Then he trained it and worked with it to answer specific questions and responses. It includes outside links to resources and websites where you can look up fair pricing, where you can get the best deals on your prescription drugs. It links to YouTube videos and even pages in his book and other helpful tools. He completed the training tool and shared it with a couple of friends who were excited about using the potential of AI to help people navigate healthcare, and then he passed away.
Speaker 1:In the weeks following his death, I was overwhelmed with the outpouring of people that were sharing stories and memories of Marshall and what his work meant to them. The one message I heard more than anything else was we need to keep his legacy going. Marshall was an influential voice in health care. People didn't want his work to fade away because it's still valuable and meaningful. So I decided in August to create the Marshall Allen Project. It's a nonprofit foundation that's mission is to help the 100 million Americans who are struggling with medical debt and to give them the tools and the knowledge to make better decisions for themselves and their families.
Speaker 1:So I'd like you to introduce you to the MAC. The MAC stands for Marshall Allen Clone. The MAC offers expert guidance for healthcare navigation using Marshall's proven methodologies for healthcare navigation using Marshall's proven methodologies. I'm just going to go ahead so you can scan the QR code and it will take you directly to the Marshall Allen Project website. Once you have it scanned and you have the website loaded, you can go to the share button on the bottom. It's like the little box with the arrow pointing up. If you click on the share button and then scroll down a little bit, it takes you to something that says add to home screen and then, when you add it to the home screen, it says add at the top and then it will show up on your phone. It looks like an app. It's actually a bookmark but what it does is it takes you directly to the Marshall Allen clone.
Speaker 1:So I'd like to do a demo, really quick of the clone so you can kind of see how it functions. So this is. You can see it on your phones and I'll show it here from my computer. This is how the map works. It's very simple. That's very straightforward.
Speaker 1:There's a list of suggested questions that you can see below how do I negotiate and lower my medical bills? What should I ask a medical provider? Why should I ask a medical provider for the cash price? And there's a variety of questions. You can see them there. So the Mac also has the capacity to you can do a phone call. Marshall programmed his voice into the Mac and so you do a phone call and it talks to you. I'm going to do the text option because otherwise it would pick up everything that I'm sitting. But if you do the text option, if you can, just you can click on any of these questions. I'm just going to click on the first one how do I negotiate and lower my medical bill? All right, so what it shows you here. It gives you a five-step process. Number one request an itemized bill with billing codes. Number two check for errors. Number three ask if the bill is negotiable. Four offer a cash payment. Five negotiate based on Medicare rates Six be persistent.
Speaker 1:You can also see these little links. So there's links here to like Billy the Try Billy app. There's links to a fairhealthconsumerorg Healthcare Blue Book. Then there's also notes. Well, normally it links to like a YouTube video or another page where Marshall has done a speech or a conversation about this particular issue. So this is his curated information. It's not scraped off of Google. It is 100% Marshall. It's 100% what he talked about and what he spoke about and it's a really, really useful tool to help people navigate what they're going through. So it's very practical in that regard. If you have an employer, if you are an employer who has a large group of non-English speaking employees, this is a really useful tool. People who live in the country who aren't native English speakers it's hard enough for us to navigate health care Imagine if you didn't speak English fluently. So this is a tool that can speak in their native tongue 115, I think that covers the vast majority and so that they can get the help that they need to answer the questions that they have.
Speaker 1:The Marshall Allen Project is the foundation that's built on his knowledge of the healthcare system and the tools that he created to help people navigate. He wanted to give people access to information so that they can make an informed decision, particularly when it comes to the cost of care. The MAC does not include any medical advice or information or suggestions. This is primarily a billing and navigational tool. In addition to the MAC, marshall also wrote a newsletter that is published on through Substack and it chronicled victory stories. So whenever Marshall went to a conference or spoke, or even in his book, he actually put his personal email and said if anyone has a bill or you know, an insurance claim denial or anything that they're trying to help email him and then he would help them figure out the bill and how to how to get, how to fight it. So he from all of those conversations then he created victory stories and the victory stories were stories that people who had used Marshall's tactics and his tools to help fight a bill or a claim denial and he came out victorious. That's the victory stories. Marshall would interview the person. He would write the stories outlining the problems and how they were overcome with action steps. Since Marshall passed away, over 90 people have gone onto his website and written victory stories of you know, victories that they had received just from using his information and his tactics. So we are now relaunching his Substack with a guest writer, andrew Gordon, who is taking those victory stories, interviewing those people and giving us a written guideline as to how to navigate those situations if you happen to be in one of those situations yourself. They are real live examples, they're easy to understand and they're actionable.
Speaker 1:We also have a video curriculum that Marshall created in 2023. It's a curriculum of 16 videos, approximately five minutes apiece, that instruct and equip people with knowledge of what's really going on in our healthcare system the kind of under looking under the rock and seeing what are some of the hidden deals and ways that people are getting taken advantage of in our healthcare system. So they also. The curriculum is also accredited with NABIP. So if you're a broker who needs continuing education credit, you can take this curriculum Also. It is accredited through SHRM and so if you are in HR and you also need continuing education, this video curriculum is available for that as well. The project is we're launching a licensing program and we have broker licenses and we have enterprise licenses available and the licensing gives you access to all of this information. So when you have a broker or an enterprise license, you have access to the healthcare literacy curriculum. You have access to the Substack and you have access to the Mac and we can collect victory stories from people who are using the Mac that we're going to be able to continue writing in the newsletter. The Mac is always being updated with current information. We're constantly adding new sources and new information to help people be navigating this.
Speaker 1:As we've heard all morning, ai is teachable and it's constantly learning. If you get on there and you're asking it questions, it will remember your conversation. If you talk to it, it will send you a transcript in your email of everything that you've discussed. And if you go back time and time again, it will also say you know, if you've had a question about something and you'll go back and you say, okay, I did this and this and that. Then the Mac will say, okay, here's the next step, this is what we can do next. It will often end the conversation with a question as to you know, do you know what to do now? Is there anything I can help you with? It will.
Speaker 1:The MAC will write an email for you. It will write an insurance, like if you got denied for coverage. It will write an appeal letter for you. It is a really practical tool. I've had patient advocates who are working and on the phone with a patient who are typing into the Mac, asking it questions, as they're talking to an insurance company, all at the same time. It's an immediate, one-on-one interaction that is very specific to you and to where your needs are. And then, finally, we are in process and gathering an army of patient advocates who are trained in Marshall's methodology, who understood the tools that he had to navigate. So when people utilize the Mac, sometimes, as you all probably well know, healthcare can get very complicated and difficult to navigate so when they use the MAC, they're able to look up EOBs, to understand CPT codes, to check for fraud or if they've been upcoded. There's a lot that you can do as an individual to understand what's really happening with your billing. And if it gets more complicated than that, we have patient advocates that are available, that are funded through the foundation, who are there to help people. Again, this is primarily billing and insurance. It's not for medical help. But the advocates are there and that's a service that we're going to be providing for you. But the advocates are there and that's a service that we're going to be providing for you.
Speaker 1:Marshall was passionate about helping people. Sorry, he was passionate about helping people who he felt were being taken advantage of by our complex and convoluted health care system. He wanted to empower people with information and tactics that they need to advocate for themselves and to win. When he spoke, he offered his email to contact people. He spent hours talking to people on the phone for free, emailing them, counseling them, listening to them, caring for them. He truly loved people and he did it well.
Speaker 1:I am working to move his legacy forward by providing this curated knowledge and expertise to people who need the guidance and the support, and navigating their bills through our AI tool, the Mac, in addition to his books, videos and newsletter. We went back through the 106 cases that Marshall helped people with individually and tallied up the amount of money that they saved by talking with him. The total came to 1.65 million, so that's an average of over 15,000 per person of savings. So for those of you who are interested in the ROI with this tool, here's one statistic. We're hoping, in the first year of the Marshall Allen Project, to save over $10 million and just put a small dent in the 100 million Americans who are facing medical debt today. Thank you, thanks for tuning in to Risk and Resolve. See you next time.
