71–80 of 227 posts
Can't wait to get banned from healthcare with no recourse unless I'm lucky enough to frontpage HN. Sarcasm aside I can't think of a company I'd trust less than Alphabet (maybe Meta) with managing healthcare.
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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.)
I'm not convinced, even with the best of intentions. In fact, I am convinced of the opposite: A) Universal Health program would result in terrible quality health care B) It would lead to longer wait times, and less choices C) It would be insanely costly to fund. We've been busy printing a lot of $. Increased the Federal deficit from $21T to $30 since COVID and there isn't a good way to fund a bloated system in USA, c…
* The US spends more public money on health care, per capita, than other wealthy nations, while also spending much much more private money than other wealthy nations
* By many measures, the US gets worse outcomes (e.g. life expectancy)
The conclusion that many draw from this is that perhaps a single-payer health care system in the US could dramatically lower private spending, also lower public spending, and perhaps improve outcomes. I don't personally know if that follows, but it's not implausible.
This is counter-intuitive to many, thus comments like your (A) through (C) are common, but might not be correct.
That said, I'm not aware of evidence that your (B) is wrong. That might be part of the trade-off.
As a non-American from America's hat, who has had a few (bigco-insurance-funded) run-ins with US Healthcare, my observations were that
* emergency health care at the no-expenses-spared level in the US was nicer than emergency healthcare up here, and I wouldn't want to pit my doctors vs those US doctors in a quality competition
* US doctors seemed really eager to waste money, like really eager, like it was creepy
How 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…
IMo, The ballooning costs in healthcare are not from not knowing how to reduce the costs or make the system more efficient. There is entrenched interests/ businesses that will lose 100s of billions if it were replaced or shifted. They absolutely will not let it happen. Spending a few billions to buy politicians is justifiable for them. That is the main reason we are in this mess and will always be. May be I am too pe…
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Healthcare isn't expensive because there are huge swaths of spending unexamined by human intelligence that might become tractable with an automated process. On the contrary, it's one of the sectors that has the most eyes and brains pointed at costs and extracting as most money as possible. On the topic of EMR systems in particular, they suck because the people using them hate them and because the people purchasing th…
Billing is the original sin of healthcare. EMRs (excluding the VA’s old MER VistA) were not developed to improve clinical workflows or outcomes, they were originally conceived to improve and streamline billing. This orientation has massively contributed to the overhead that EMRs like Epic and Cerner introduce. On the startup and health improve lament side, billing is the rock that so many great ideas break on. It doe…
https://archive.ph/kQVpU
Just imagine a world where they revolutionized healthcare as they did with advertising!
Please no. They have too much info on everyone already
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> IMO, the Pacific coast states need to reject national health care, create a health-care pact between states that slowly grows larger by adding new states. If another state doesn't want to join, then, so be it. It blows my mind that they don’t do this. During most of the 20th century, Democrat-run states wanted to tax Republican California to pay for social programs. So doing things at the national level was critica…
How do you avoid the obvious adverse selection problem? California can't prevent the most expensive people in the country from moving there, and the system we're talking about would be a powerful incentive for those people to do so.