Hi everyone!

My name is Brennen Hodge and I'm an entrepreneur on a social mission to fix our failing healthcare system. I've decided that I will not passively sit back and watch as corrupt politicians, greedy pharmaceutical companies, and unethical health insurance companies take advantage of us by charging more and more for healthcare, only for us to get less and for their profits & bonuses to increase.

I believe the health of a person should take precedence over corporate profit.

I believe in prosperity for all, not extreme financial gain for a few.

I believe that the power of the people is greater than the people in power.

I believe it's time to make a change.

I know you've heard the quote, "If your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough." Well, I've been working on a dream (or vision, rather) over the past few years that absolutely terrifies and excites me at the same time. This is something so audacious and so radical that I have a hard time telling people about it because it seems impossible to the ones who blindly believe & follow the status quo. But all of you on Steemit will get it. You and I are the pioneers of this new beautiful decentralized technology called the blockchain. You and I together are the ones that will build the future for ourselves and for future generations to come.

Everything started falling into place when I held my first born son a few days after he was home from the hospital. There's something very profound about bringing a new human being into this world that makes you view life from a higher perspective. As I held him, I imagined what his life would look like when he was my age and how much the world would progress (or regress) in the realm of healthcare. Combining everything I knew about the advances of artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, omic research, quantum computing, and just about every other exponential technology, I envisioned what the future could be and should be.

For the sake of my son, my current & future family members, and every beating heart on this planet, I've dedicated the next 30 years of my life to build this future.

So what's this big idea?

I've developed a system that eliminates the need for health insurance. The whole industry -- gone. No longer needed. I'm calling it "Citizen Health -- Healthcare for the people, by the people."

I've constructed the concept behind Citizen Health as if there were no existing healthcare landscape. As if we blew up our current system and gathered our greatest minds together to develop a better way to do healthcare. I imagined what healthcare of the future could be when we use technologies & capabilities of tomorrow, not the business models we've been keeping on life support for the past 50 years.

To build an organization like Citizen Health, I had to think differently. So, with a solid idea of what the future could and should look like, I started working backwards. It's much easier to connect the dots thinking that way -- the status quo doesn't apply.

Here's a brief overview:

Citizen Health is a new health ecosystem that involves a peer-to-peer funding, collaboration, & governance platform built on the blockchain that pools money & resources together to pay health professionals directly and instantly. We're going to crowdfund & crowdsource an entirely new ecosystem (I'm launching an ICO soon) where there are no health insurance middlemen (it's run by AI, smart contracts, & chatbots) to convolute the relationship between health professionals and patients. The perverse incentives & moral hazards that for-profit insurance companies and third party payers create do not belong in a system that manages our health & well-being. Citizen Health eliminates the need for the 300+ different health insurance companies completely. I'm not trying to compete with them. I'm changing the game.

The foundations of Citizen Health:

Peer-to-Peer HealthFund: This P2P mega fund consists of cryptocurrencies collected from monthly memberships, investments from other entities, and from token sales. These funds will pay & reward doctors, patients, developers, scientists, and other participants.
Collaboration Engine: Our collaboration engine will be the driving force connecting intelligent people from all over the earth to focus on solving problems in science and medicine. This will include health professionals, scientists, developers, engineers, researchers, caregivers, etc.
Community Governance Platform: This will be a hybrid of liquid democracy and futarchy. All decisions pertaining to Citizen Health will be made on this layer and all token holders will be able to propose, discuss, and vote for these decisions.
HealthGrid: This will consist of user generated health records, genomic data, microbiomic data, and numerous other data points from health trackers and wearables.

The purpose of the above stack is straightforward: To build a healthcare system that is 10x better than our current global health system. With all the exponential technologies about to converge in the next few years, we're about to enable opportunities that were never financially or technically feasible before. For the first time in human history, we'll be able to practice proactive, preventive medicine, not the costly & inefficient reactive care we've been used to.

Adding to this boldness, I believe the foundations we're building with Citizen Health will enable us to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by 2050. With the progression of Moore's Law and the advances of nanotechnology, biotechnology, omic research, and CRISPR, we're about to create a future where this is possible.

The turning point

Over the past few years, I've done significant research in crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and crypto economics which has changed my perspectives on capitalism and corporate structures. I believe our future will not be the "big government, big corporations" we commonly see in science fiction movies, but rather taking the structure of decentralized collaborative organizations where tasks, services, knowledge, & value are distributed among many rather than in hierarchical controlled silos. I see this transformation happening in healthcare, leading to an ecosystem that is financed, owned, operated, and governed by the only people who matter in the equation -- the patient & health professional.

I'm not getting into the blockchain specifics right now, but the opportunities this technology enables will open up entirely new economic business models that haven't been conceived before. We need what the blockchain offers in order to grow AI, robotics, healthcare, finance, government, and the future of the world. I believe you see the same opportunity I'm seeing with blockchain tech.

Here's the deal. We are at a turning point in our country. We MUST do something to fix this broken mess or else we're going to continue on this path:

This chart is behind a few years, but I'll fill you in on where we're at now. For the first time in decades, our life expectancy in America has DECLINED. We're now spending $10,000 per person for our life expectancy to decrease. I know there are plenty of factors that come to play in this equation, but I'm pointing the finger at the Medical Industrial Complex we have created.

What's next?

Disrupting the American Medical Industry might seem like a pie-in-the-sky dream, but I've spent the past two years of my life researching and planning this out and I have a clear roadmap to move forward. I'll be releasing details over the coming weeks.

I know I'm not going to be able to do this alone -- It's going to take thousands, if not millions of people joining forces together to bring on a revolution.

Would you like to help me in this endeavor? If this message rings true to you, please share it with your colleagues, friends, and family. Upvote it, share it, resteem it -- whatever it takes!

Do you have any stories about terrible experiences with health insurance or the medical industry? Do you have any suggestions on what you would like to see implemented in a new healthcare system? Care to express what you dislike about the American (or any other country) medical system? If so, please comment below. Let's get the conversation going!

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Thank you for taking the time to read this,

-Brennen Hodge