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Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

economist.com

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Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#111

Post by jholman »

the_d3f4ult wrote: post #106
jholman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding (A) and (C), this is the obligatory reminder that: * 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 lowe…

> US doctors seemed really eager to waste money, like really eager, like it was creepy Your last point is purely a function of the liability culture in the states. US physicians are quite aware of what's appropriate and what's inappropriate testing wise. However, as long as a physician can be held personally liable for any oversight - meaning that the results of an entire career can be lost - they're going to over-te…

Purely a function of liability culture? That seems like an extraordinary claim, your claim that there are no other causes. Do you have extraordinary evidence?

I'll note that I do have a few different bits of modest evidence to the contrary. But I wanted to focus my comment on concrete observations (both the large-scale statistical kind, and the personal anecdotal kind), rather than on speculation.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#112

Post by 1986 »

Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #97
suture wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.)

Being a communist absolutely makes you an evil person. About 5 times more evil than the group of people they fought against in a war. As for socialized medicine it makes doctors another arm of the government. In the UK last week (or the week before) one arm of the government ordered another arm of the government to kill a 9 year old. We are also just outside a 2 year stretch of tyranny of governments all over the wor…

The Viet Cong were 5 times more evil than the USA?

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#113

Post by afiori »

Contexti wrote: post #101
afiori wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> il Are you mixing French and Italian articles? As an addendum wiktionary[0] is always useful when searching other meanings of a word [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/viola

il is a pronoun[0] in French. I haven't learned French since high school, but here's how I would translate the examples: il la viola "He raped her" il viola la loi "He broke the law" [0]( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/il#French )

oh, I did not know, but I studied about 6 hours of French in my life, so it is not surprising.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#114

Post by lotsofpulp »

xyzzyz wrote: post #80
tptacek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

Education costs are peanuts compared to healthcare costs.

Not to mention that educating children provides a significant economic return to the state in the form of labor when the children grow up. Whereas dialysis and heart surgeries and hip replacements for 70+ year olds is a complete loss.

For examples, a single NICU baby or hemophiliac can easily cost $1M+ per year. Health insurers almost had to stop selling policies in Iowa due to a single hemophiliac who needed $1M/month medications:

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/health/2017/05/...

There is a reason why universal healthcare is such a political football. It is the single most expensive thing the country spends its resources on, and it is not even universal yet. Hence all the tribes fighting over access to public resources for it, and solutions implemented to ration resources along those tribal lines, via the use of managed care organizations (health insurance companies) and hugely varying reimbursement rules for different programs like Medicare (old), Medicaid (poor), Tricare (military), commercial plans, etc.

All the premium increases people complained about due to ACA are a fraction of the tax increases that would have had to happen for universal healthcare. The other option is pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and doctors take a huge pay cut.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#115

Post by nicolapede »

Gehlitio wrote: post #91
GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #21

Please no. They have too much info on everyone already

Do you life with something chronic? Something were not a lot of people are doing research and we're there was no real discovery in the last 20 years? Because I do and you know how scattered the field of medicine is? There is one realistic way of getting more people with chronic issues new threatments and it's data. Lots and lots of it. IF someone can pull that of while protecting the individuals I believe it's alphab…

> IF someone can pull that of while protecting the individuals I believe it's alphabet. Together with deep mind and all the other research they do.

What makes you think they will protect the "individuals"? From a privacy persepctive, I would say they have no clear incentive in doing that, given individuals are the product they sell to companies that need to push ads into society.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#116

Post by dominotw »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #87
glglwty wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly why they might be able to make healthcare cheaper.

Healthcare is not expensive for lack of huge government-entangled corporations monopolizing and commercializing patient personal information. At least not in USA, where healthcare legislation is written by and for the industry (e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/05/obamac... ), and total healthcare expenditure is somewhere around double that of most other first world countries with more universa…

> total healthcare expenditure is somewhere around double that of most other first world countries with more universal healthcare systems, for worse outcomes in many objective measures

I've seen this many times but it makes a meaningless healthcare = health correlation .

America has lots of systemic problems that affect health outcomes that are outside of healthcare. Low quality fast food, food addiction, industrialized farming, corn subsides, food deserts, deceptive food marketing to name a few.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#117

Post by mountainriver »

scarmig wrote: post #16
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #4

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…

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…

So your telling me EMR is the Jira of healthcare

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#118

Post by spywaregorilla »

Gehlitio wrote: post #91
GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #21

Please no. They have too much info on everyone already

Do you life with something chronic? Something were not a lot of people are doing research and we're there was no real discovery in the last 20 years? Because I do and you know how scattered the field of medicine is? There is one realistic way of getting more people with chronic issues new threatments and it's data. Lots and lots of it. IF someone can pull that of while protecting the individuals I believe it's alphab…

Free medicine, but we alter your gene code to put ads in your poop.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#119

Post by Gehlitio »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #99
Gehlitio wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still plenty of expensive threatments like cancer were the diagnosis is also costly just due to the tech used. A proper MRI is expensive, the analysis is slow and need experts etc. There are plenty of things to optimize. And when we are done with us, it has to reach the next level to become so cheap and easy to use that everyone on our planet has access to it.

> There are still plenty of expensive threatments like cancer were the diagnosis is also costly just due to the tech used. > A proper MRI is expensive, the analysis is slow and need experts etc. I'm sure that's very true. A company that's struggles to keep a rudimentary chat app running for any length of time, spectacularly miscalculated its fiber project, to name a few obvious ones, does not instill any confidence t…

Are we talking about the same company?

Google maps was and still is free, available and changed lives.

GCP is extremely innovative. From full end to end encryption including encryption on rest.

Google workspace works like a charm.

They have well working ML in all newer pixel phones for images etc.

They have tons of bleeding edge research papers on so many different ml topics (are you aware of their research blog?)

Google has one of the best / if not the best certified cloud env in the world. They already work with the biggest health service provider in the USA.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#120

Post by Gehlitio »

nicolapede wrote: post #115
Gehlitio wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you life with something chronic? Something were not a lot of people are doing research and we're there was no real discovery in the last 20 years? Because I do and you know how scattered the field of medicine is? There is one realistic way of getting more people with chronic issues new threatments and it's data. Lots and lots of it. IF someone can pull that of while protecting the individuals I believe it's alphab…

> IF someone can pull that of while protecting the individuals I believe it's alphabet. Together with deep mind and all the other research they do. What makes you think they will protect the "individuals"? From a privacy persepctive, I would say they have no clear incentive in doing that, given individuals are the product they sell to companies that need to push ads into society.

Checkout their last Google Io.

They know how they make their money and don't hide it. But they make you as an individual disappear.

It's a much better compromise than from any other company and they drive this topic for years.

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