YC Research: Universal Healthcare
blog.ycombinator.com
YC Research: Universal Healthcare
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Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#2This is fantastic news. Congrats Watsi!
It has always seemed like this was the end goal; to build a proof of concept healthcare delivery platform for the third world. Very exciting!
EDIT: Sidenote: Thanks YC for funding Watsi as your first non-profit and attempting to tackle a hard social problem.
Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#3I read the other day that here in Costa Rica the health care 'caja' has 1 employee per 85 people, it's more like working there is the plan. I can't wait to see what Watsi does next.
Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#4Love the ambition. Bring some transparency, reduce fraud, use technology to reduce cost where possible. Great idea, hope it works.
I'm skeptical it could reduce healthcare costs significantly simply because of the massive effort required to change the healthcare behemoth in even small ways. However, given the exorbitant costs of healthcare (currently paying $1800/month for a family of 4), it's worth certainly trying.
Is there a time frame on this experiment?
Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#5Cool and interesting. I'm not very familiar with Watsi, but is its innovation mainly in business processes for healthcare non-profits - mainly improving information and resources flows?
Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#6Cool and interesting. I'm not very familiar with Watsi, but is its innovation mainly in business processes for healthcare non-profits - mainly improving information and resources flows?
https://watsi.org/about
They accept donations to fund healthcare for people in the third world, while being radically transparent (there is a Google Docs link out there with the details for every procedure they've funded).
They're also exceedingly good at weeding out fraud, and are transparent about that as well (when fraud has occurred, the resolution, and how they fix the problem moving forward).
They are, quite frankly, how you would build a single payer healthcare system as a startup.
Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#7Great news. Once it gets going I'd be interested in seeing the strategy to make it sustainable. I believe donation models are inherently unsustainable so it'll be a challenge.
Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#8I wonder what the long-term on this is going to look like. It would seem to me like an amazing irony if the receiving nation ended up with better and cheaper healthcare than the US considering that YC and Watsi call the US home.
Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#9> For the initial project, Watsi will fund primary healthcare for a community in the developing world and build a platform to run the system transparently.
Have they decided what country (or countries) in which this will take place?
While I'm sure there are many worthy candidates worldwide, applying the same type of program to under served communities within the USA would be great as well.
Re: YC Research: Universal Healthcare
#10Unless you remove people out of the equation, universal healthcare will never work. There's no incentive for anyone to be efficient, more frugal, work harder, provide a better service in universal healthcare. Humans arent wired for this.