In 2006, Alex Tolbert was in his third year of the JD/MBA program at Vanderbilt University when he learned about Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). His prior summer working at a major New York investment bank helped him to conclude that the finance career he had been working towards was not for him. Health law classes caused Alex to become very passionate about the misaligned incentives in healthcare. Upon learning about HSAs and running quotes for individual HSA plans online, Alex concluded that they could be the first step towards re-aligning a lot of those misaligned incentives. In July 2006, Bernard Health was born.

About eight months and just a few clients later, Alex’s brother Brian made his decision and left LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers to join Bernard. Joining Bernard at that time meant sleeping on Alex’s couch in Nashville. Shortly after that, Alex finished the JD/MBA program he had started, Alex and Brian got a 3-bedroom place in Nashville’s Hillsboro Village, and things really got going.

Alex and Brian quickly found that while employers may not get the best advice related to Health Savings Accounts, individuals and families have almost nowhere to go for the kind of advice they really need. This great need in a worthwhile area helped the twosome develop Bernard’s mission to be the world’s most trusted advisor when it comes to helping people plan how to pay for healthcare expenses.

Bernard specializes in helping employers with HSA-based health plan options because 99% of the time the HSA strategy we have developed is the best strategy for an employer to pursue. When that changes, Bernard will change. And if you are an employer that is in that 1% where the HSA is not the best option, we’ll simply tell you and explain why.

Bernard has a more nuanced approach to serving individuals and families with our team of non-commissioned advisors at our retail store. When it comes to individuals and families, we certainly can help with an HSA-based health plan, but people often have an array of options available to them (Medicare, COBRA, an employer option, etc) that could disqualify an HSA from being the best option. We get an understanding of all of the options each retail client has, and then work to identify the best one, saving our clients money and time while providing a lot of peace of mind in the process.

In short, we want to earn the privilege of being your most trusted advisor in this increasingly complicated healthcare arena.