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Ralph is passionate about healthcare and finance, which stems from personal experiences with his sister's tragic death and his father's battle with cancer. He became an air traffic controller but later transitioned to the corporate world. After his mother's death, he became even more passionate about healthcare and patient finance. He learned about Dr. Marius Bernard, who believed in not only extending physical life but also avoiding financial harm. Ralph now focuses on providing affordable healthcare for employees, as medical debt is a major issue in the US. He is driven to improve the lives of employees and tackle the waste in the healthcare system. Who is Ralph and what drives him to get up in the morning, what does he love to do, what is he passionate about? Well first of all, I'm passionate about health care and about finance and about health care finance. All things financial, all things health care. Why is that? Well when I was 11 years old, my sister was tragically killed in a car crash. Very very unexpected and it devastated my parents. I was in the 6th grade. After that I went to boarding school, my parents moved from Thailand to Nepal but a year and a half later my dad was diagnosed with cancer. He moved from Nepal back to Thailand for treatment because they had more advanced medical care in Thailand. I moved from boarding school in Canada back to Thailand to be with him. After I lost my sister so tragically, I didn't want to lose another family member without doing everything I could. As he was treated for the cancer, the cancer moved from his nose to his neck and the doctors told him that he had gotten up to the safe dosage of radiation and if they kept going, they could give him radiation poisoning but if they stopped, the cancer would kill him. So he had a choice to make. He said keep going, keep shooting. So they kept going and they cured the cancer. We moved back to Canada from Thailand after that because of his health. We thought we could get better care in Canada at the time so we moved back. For about a year he was okay but not great, he still worked. Then he started getting worse. He slowly lost his sight, his hearing and he started losing his mind. He didn't know where he was, he was confused most of the time. I took care of him during that time. I bathed him, I fed him, I shaved him, I took him to the bathroom. I was not going to let another family member die without showing them that I loved them. So I skipped out a lot of school to take care of my dad and because of it, I didn't get great grades in school despite being really, really smart and having been the top of my class for the last few years before that time. Because of that, I barely graduated from high school and my grades weren't good enough to get into college initially. So I became a commercial pilot and then an air traffic controller. I loved air traffic control, it was very stressful but it required a lot of mental arithmetic, sharpness, attention to extreme detail. Sometimes you had 50, sometimes more aircraft in your control zone. Some of them going as fast as 500, 600 miles an hour, some even faster. Some going as slow as 100 miles an hour. All different altitudes, going all different directions, all different speeds of climb and descent, all kinds of weather. It could be nighttime, it could be daytime, they could be in clouds but most of them were flying blind. They didn't know where they were going. My job was to keep them safe, get them to their destination. I loved air traffic control. Then I did some management training and I got into the corporate world, management in a few different positions and then eventually I decided I needed to work for myself and I needed to do something challenging. I needed to do something with finance because when my dad died he was only 49 years old and my mother had never worked. So I needed to do something that involved finance. I knew that as a starting point. So I started studying insurance, financial planning and things of that nature. I specialized in the early days in group benefits but I continued to study financial planning and estate planning. I became a specialist in advanced estate and financial planning, special needs planning, philanthropy, all the time working a lot in healthcare because that was another passion of mine and I felt I could do a lot of good there. Then my mother started getting sick when she got into her 80s and she was living all alone in Western Canada. I was living in Texas. I would go up there every two to three months and take care of her, make sure she got to see the doctor and I would always advocate for her. Once in a while I'd get a call late at night from the neighbor that she'd been taken to the hospital and I'd fly out there on the next plane. Then during the pandemic her blood pressure had started going up the last two years. She'd had low blood pressure her whole life. Started going up. She had a family doctor that was well into his 80s and a naturopath because she couldn't get all the care she needed from her GP. Then she started getting really sick and the GP suggested she get an echo. It took her seven months to get the echo. She finally got it. It took her another three or four months to see a cardiologist. The cardiologist adjusted all of her meds. She said that her meds were completely wrong and she needed to get rid of some retained fluid and she changed up all her meds. After about a month and a half my mother wasn't responding. She called the doctor's office and she said, I need to get back in to see the cardiologist. These meds aren't working. They said it's a one year wait to see the cardiologist. You can see your GP. And she said, but it was my GP that caused the problem. They said your GP is perfectly competent to manage your meds. A couple of days later she got a letter from the government saying, congratulations. And I may be paraphrasing slightly, but basically it said you qualify for the MAID program. MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying. And she called up and she said, what's this all about? I just want to see the cardiologist. And they said, well, it'll be a year to see the cardiologist, but it's only a two week wait for the MAID program. And we'll send a doctor right to your house. You don't even have to go out and deliver a lethal dose. You just need to get two doctors to okay it. And one of them already had that worked with the MAID program. So she said, what's the waiting period? And they said two weeks. Thirteen days later they sent a doctor and a nurse to her house and delivered the lethal dose and killed her. I became even more passionate about medical care, patient care, patient finance, medical finance. And I had a friend, and we're going back in time before my mother's death now, his name was Marius Bernard, Dr. Marius Bernard. He was the brother of Dr. Christian Bernard. And the Bernard brothers jointly performed the very first successful human to human heart transplant in South Africa on December 2nd, 1967. Before they developed that procedure and did it successfully, when people had a heart attack, they died. And that was it. And if they were smart and had life insurance, that took care of their families. And life was pretty simple. But Dr. Bernard told me once that he takes the Hippocratic Oath very, very seriously. And the first part of the Hippocratic Oath was first do no harm. Dr. Bernard believed that that extended to do no financial harm. And he said when he treated patients, giving them a heart transplant, giving them a new lease of life, and he'd see them six months later, they were angry, and he couldn't figure it out. And he said, I've extended your life. Why are you angry? And they would say, you've extended my physical life, but financially I'm ruined. Not only for medical bills, but I can't work as much as I used to and I can't pay the bills. So Dr. Bernard lobbied the insurance companies and developed a product called Critical Illness Insurance to take care of those needs. Fast forward again to current day. I see employers struggling to pay for affordable health care so that their employees can be well financially and physically. And it's hard to afford. 56% of insured Americans have medical debt. 59% of Americans that are uninsured have medical debt. Two-thirds of bankruptcies in the U.S. are caused by medical issues. Every year, 500,000 Americans declare bankruptcy due to medical bills. The average cost of health care for an employer is between $15,000 and $16,000 per person per year. For a family, it's about $2,000 a month, $24,000 a year. For a single, it's about $8,000 or $9,000 per year. That's a lot of money. In the U.S., we spend over $5 trillion a year on medical care. There are only two countries on the planet that have GDP that exceeds $5 trillion, and that's the U.S. and China. Every other country has a GDP that's lower than what the U.S. spends on health care. I think it's 17.9% of the GDP that's spent on health care. It's a huge number, and there's so much waste in health care. The billing system, the way they charge, the way the insurance companies look at the bill and reprice the bills, the way they pass the cost on to the employee. I decided that this was a huge issue, which I am hugely passionate about, and every day I go to the office and I try to improve the lives of a few employees, and that's what gets me up in the morning.