Alison Richards

The price tag was the revolution

Open the app. Look up a knee MRI, a primary care visit, a planned procedure. There is a number next to each one, and you see it before anything happens. That is the whole idea behind Surest, and Alison Richards runs the company built on it.

Most health plans tell you the cost after the fact, on a statement that arrives weeks later. Surest flips the order. There are no deductibles and no coinsurance. Prices are set upfront, so a member can compare two providers the way they would compare two flights, then choose. Richards leads this company as Chief Executive Officer, reporting into UnitedHealthcare, which now owns it outright.

The framing sounds modest until you sit with it. In an industry where confusion is practically a feature, putting a legible price in front of someone before they commit is close to heresy. Richards has spent her tenure proving the heresy pays - for members who shop and for the employers who fund the plans.

The shape of the company she runs

Surest is headquartered in Minneapolis. The plan is offered to employers nationwide with self-funded health benefits, and to fully insured customers in a growing set of states. Inside UnitedHealthcare, Richards describes it as the place new ideas get tried first.

Shop, compare, decide

The mechanics are deliberately boring, which is the point. Richards keeps coming back to a comparison most insurance executives avoid: buying care should feel like buying anything else.

The thesis is that clarity changes behavior. When people can see what a treatment costs and where, they pick differently - and that drift toward higher-value choices is where the savings for employers come from. Richards puts the cause and effect plainly.

From Bind to Surest, without missing a step

Richards joined UnitedHealthcare in 2012 and stayed. That is rarer than it sounds at the top of a fast-moving company - she has led through a rebrand and an acquisition while keeping the growth curve pointed up. Before insurance, she worked at Sutter Health. She studied at Dartmouth College.

The company she runs started life as Bind, a personalized, on-demand health plan that launched its model in 2016. UnitedHealthcare backed it, then bought it, then in August 2022 retired the Bind name in favor of Surest. The product stayed the same; the ambition got bigger. Through all of it, Richards held the CEO seat and the original premise: a plan people can actually understand.

Colleagues describe her as a transformational leader who believes in the power of team. It is the kind of line that shows up on a lot of executive bios, but here it tracks with the work - a long bench of operators around her, and a product whose entire value proposition is that it respects the person on the other end enough to tell them the price.

The quotable Richards

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