I listened to the econtalk with Keith Smith, an entrepreneur and anesthesiologist who runs a surgery center in Oklahoma. Keith saw a problem within health care that affected everyone who came to get necessary surgery that would ruin their life financially. He saw an opportunity to make life better for people and attract more customers and compete with big name hospitals in the area with adjusting prices that makes it more affordable for people to get surgery.Keith noticed this issue whenever he first started his anesthesiology practice in 1990 and notice the outrageous pricing within basic surgerys. In 1997 Keith and a man named Steve Lantier walked away from the big name hospitals and started his own hospital. He started undercutting prices for people that were compared to others 10 of thousands of dollars difference from the other hospitals. Keith wanted to start working with insurance companies that insure all hospitals everywhere but none of the insurance companies wanted to work with him which led him to realizing that fueling the outlandish pricing to the hospitals was the insurance companies. Keith's name and business was not loved across Oklahoma he was blatantly showing the people the scams all of the hospitals and insurance companies were advocating. With his new innovative pricing business battling all of the other high priced businesses he had attracted a wide range of revenue and was attracting people from everywhere. When they first started about 40% of their patients were from Oklahoma and then slowly to this date kept increasing all the way to about 60% to this day and attracting people from even out of the country putting him at 5% of their patients coming into Oklahoma to be operated on due to the prices. Keith had a lot of hoops to jump through to be able to continue to run his business due to certain standards and legality issues with the medical field. The basic breakdown of this entrepreneurial action is keith saw an issue which was people being financially ruined after visiting the hospital evben for basic procedures so he took that opportunity to target the lower class people that need medical attention and cut the prices to what they really should be attracting a lot more customers that would keep him in a competitive race with all of the surrounding hospitals in the area who did not change or support Keith's innovative way to produce money in the medical field leaving people financially stable.
