Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
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Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#2Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#3Google offers a lot of free services. Can they figure out how to make healthcare free?
Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#4How incredible would it be if Alphabet spent, say 1% of their total healthcare venture budget, just running models on all of the different ways that the cost of healthcare could be reduced and access to care could increase. And maybe they do this already (we have no idea if they do, it might be nice to share that information if they did). It's just become so clear that many people believe the anti-science stuff that gets thrown around these days because they can't even afford to participate in the healthcare system anymore. And who can blame them? Figuring out how to get medical records systems to talk to each other isn't going to solve this problem.
But no, let's throw billions of dollars at anti-aging instead...
Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#5> In 2021 America’s five tech behemoths collectively spent more than $3bn on speculative health-care bets
And there’s even more giants:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23162503/oracle-cerner-he...
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/oracle-cerner-p...
Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#6How incredible would it be if Alphabet spent, say 1% of their total healthcare venture budget, just running models on all of the different ways that the cost of healthcare could be reduced and access to care could increase. And maybe they do this already (we have no idea if they do, it might be nice to share that information if they did). It's just become so clear that many people believe the anti-science stuff that…
"Running models" can't fix problems that are political conflicts between competing interests. You don't need DeepMind to tell you Certificate of Need laws reduce access and increase price; you need a political coalition that can overturn them.
Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#7Google offers a lot of free services. Can they figure out how to make healthcare free?
Assuming by free you mean universal coverage that is (almost) free at the point of usage then this is a solved problem. What the United States lacks in order to realize a solution is political willpower and an electorate that is savvy enough to know that wanting such a system does not make one a communist. (And that being a communist does not make one an evil person.)
Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#8How incredible would it be if Alphabet spent, say 1% of their total healthcare venture budget, just running models on all of the different ways that the cost of healthcare could be reduced and access to care could increase. And maybe they do this already (we have no idea if they do, it might be nice to share that information if they did). It's just become so clear that many people believe the anti-science stuff that…
You're not getting cheaper healthcare by using more machine learning, it's a hard problem for a reason.
Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#9Google offers a lot of free services. Can they figure out how to make healthcare free?
Assuming by free you mean universal coverage that is (almost) free at the point of usage then this is a solved problem. What the United States lacks in order to realize a solution is political willpower and an electorate that is savvy enough to know that wanting such a system does not make one a communist. (And that being a communist does not make one an evil person.)
...also the fact that the electorate generally can't out-compete the big money interests that lobby heavily to keep healthcare a private venture.
It's so easy to blame voters but the reality is that politics is about messaging, and how is the electorate supposed be savvy enough when these companies can spend unlimited amounts of money to keep us fighting each other about this stuff? Make no mistake, Google benefits from this depravity too.
Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming by free you mean universal coverage that is (almost) free at the point of usage then this is a solved problem. What the United States lacks in order to realize a solution is political willpower and an electorate that is savvy enough to know that wanting such a system does not make one a communist. (And that being a communist does not make one an evil person.)
...also the fact that the electorate generally can't out-compete the big money interests that lobby heavily to keep healthcare a private venture. It's so easy to blame voters but the reality is that politics is about messaging, and how is the electorate supposed be savvy enough when these companies can spend unlimited amounts of money to keep us fighting each other about this stuff? Make no mistake, Google benefits f…
It’s not the lobbyist. There is still a lot of people who don’t want universal healthcare because it might benefit “those lazy people who don’t want to work” and older people on Medicare who “want to keep the government out of healthcare”.