About Us
How we got here:
Healthcare is such an important topic… and a polarizing debate in the United States. Pamela Nygaard, the founder of ControlAltMed, would know, since she spent over 15 years as an insider within two of the largest health insurance companies in America. She endured many sleepless nights in an effort to provide great health insurance packages for small to large sized companies. As a business manager, she partnered with underwriting, provider/doctor contracting, HR staff, CFO’s, insurance brokers, and customer service representatives to make sure the price and coverage was right for the employees being covered.
Working on the inside, Pamela could see the significant benefits to self-insuring. She educated her brokers and employers on the benefits of self-insuring their company plans. It would enable them to gain the leverage that the major corporations have, which meant more risk, in exchange for transparency and huge cost savings.
She also tracked emerging trends in the healthcare space. The first trend was the unchecked rising costs of prescription medications. Rising faster than any other category, medications had gone from 10-25% of total healthcare spend all the way to 50-70%!
The second trend was the increasing gap between what uninsured individuals paid, versus those with insurance. The “retail” price of healthcare was an arbitrary number that even hospital executives were unable to explain. So in an effort to publish impressive discounts for the insurance carriers, the retail costs would skyrocket and those paying out of pocket were bearing the brunt. Pamela realized then that the real value of insurance was gaining access to these negotiated discounts.
And finally, Pamela become obsessed with understanding the third trend where the healthcare costs in the United States had risen to double that of the next closest country and yet, the medical outcomes were on par with third world countries. Her extensive research revealed that other countries use multiple forms of treatment, whereas the U.S. relied almost exclusively on medication and surgery. Results were significantly better in places that utilized a cross-section of healing modalities that included nutrition, lifestyle analysis and root caused based treatments.
As much as Pamela wanted to fix all of the healthcare issues, she knew she couldn’t tackle them all at once. Determined to take a different approach to healthcare, she figured out how to allow access to the pre-negotiated doctor contracts to individuals, and teach people how to self-insure their needs, or at least save money on their healthcare expenses with ControlAltMed. Second, she created eSecondOpinion in order to educate people on the many modalities of health and healing available from around the world. Incorporating this knowledge to a discount membership plan is a huge first step in empowering people to manage their own well-being and Reset Healthcare!
About the Founders
Pamela Nygaard went to Grand Canyon University to study nursing but due to a family emergency, she chose to leave the field and became a financial planner in Tacoma, WA. She later moved to Seattle after getting hired to sell a “new” healthcare approach, called a high deductible plan. The concept took off and she wound up working on large employer plans and national accounts. Then she led a team to sell self-insured health, pharmacy, life, vision, and dental insurance to employers.
In the midst of the Affordable Healthcare political discussion, she left because she felt compelled to pursue eSecondOpinion, which provides global solutions for health conditions. In an effort to add more value, she created ControlAltMed to provide benefits to consumers. Now she and Susan have a team of sales people who are expanding across the U.S. and is excited about providing hope and solutions for people everywhere.
Susan Lynn comes with an extensive background in Project/Program Management in IT and Business Operations. When she left Corporate America for independent consulting, she was shocked at the cost of health insurance. Having primarily paid out of pocket for alternative care anyway, she could not justify an entire year’s medical costs as just a monthly premium. Having run a previous business together, when Pamela approached Susan about the idea for Control Alt Med, not only did Susan love the idea, she immediately became a member, advocate and jumped on board as the operations support behind ControlAlt Med’s vision.
