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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you dont disappear. you become embedded. they are metaphorically assigning you a number and stripping you of an identity. It is dehumanizing. At the end of the day, it's just you by a different name. Instead of owning it and claiming "we have this information on Gehlitio" they say things like "We have these generalizations about anybody who happens to use HN, speaks in English, bought X Y and Z, subscribes to A, "

Have you lived with chronic pain, or expected to live the rest of your life disabled?

Because privacy doesn't seem all that important once you actually are going through it.

If you had to pick between being a cripple (say, with your arms or your legs useless) and forgoing your privacy are you really sure you'd give more value to privacy?

Do actually consider what life is like under these circumstances before answering. I don't think there are many quadriplegic people out there who'd pick privacy over being healed.

"X is more important than Y" isn't honest if you never lacked Y and can't even consider a future where you lack Y

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

#152

I really wish Google would just accept it's a dumb advertising company and forget about these moonshots. It's just to stroke the founders ego. They are big enough. Pay out a huge dividend or something.

Completely disagree. There is huge scope in healthcare for automation, pre-emptive diagnosis and raising the bar for precision. It is mostly going to be done by a company with good AI chops, I would put my money on Google, from what I have heard about their efforts.

Which is entirely orthogonal from how they might (ab)use that data. They are a commercial company. It will be commercialised. No. Not ok by me.

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree. There is huge scope in healthcare for automation, pre-emptive diagnosis and raising the bar for precision. It is mostly going to be done by a company with good AI chops, I would put my money on Google, from what I have heard about their efforts.

Google often has terrible execution when it lies outside their direct core businesses. You are correct they have amazing engineering talent, but that is not the problem here.

The issue here is not "engineering talent" The current hodge podge of Health care apps, web sites and and insurance systems all work correctly.

The business logic is broken.

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

#154
post #144

So, another service that Google can build two different versions of, then discontinue without warning after a couple of years?

"We're sunsetting Google Pacemaker on December 31, 2029..."

Enterprise version for 39,999 a month where the data stays private, for now. Sign in with your gmail. Our AI will manage all suspicious activity.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, industriali…

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

It doesn't, it's just making an observation.

> 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.

Sure, America has many issues and many more than you've listed. So do other countries. And they all have many differences in healthcare systems. All this makes it impossible to formulate a mathematical proof. Which fortunately I was not trying to do.

So we can't really measure the precise effectiveness of healthcare systems and health expenditure, sure. But surely the burden is on the people who would to claim that 2x healthcare expenditure for worse (or not significantly better) health than many other countries is a reasonable cost efficiency, to come up with some pretty strong evidence to support them.

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

#156

I really wish Google would just accept it's a dumb advertising company and forget about these moonshots. It's just to stroke the founders ego. They are big enough. Pay out a huge dividend or something.

"dumb advertising company" is trivialising the amazing tech and products Google has. Google has very justified bad reputation around product shutdowns and privacy, but I don't think being dumb is one of them.

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

#157
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Vermont did try it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform It does not work for the reasons tptacek wrote. With freedom of movement, eventually net benefit recipients will move in, and net payers into the system will move out.

Vermont (a tiny state) would suffer much more from that than would California.

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

#158
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the possible upside. The possible downside is "if you ever search for a disease in Chrome, or on your Android device, or at google.com, we will notify your insurance company who will raise your rates".

So higher insurance rates versus getting better research into life saving treatments? When you put it that way…

Higher insurance rates seem likely, and significantly better research seems unlikely.

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

#159

I really wish Google would just accept it's a dumb advertising company and forget about these moonshots. It's just to stroke the founders ego. They are big enough. Pay out a huge dividend or something.

Completely disagree. There is huge scope in healthcare for automation, pre-emptive diagnosis and raising the bar for precision. It is mostly going to be done by a company with good AI chops, I would put my money on Google, from what I have heard about their efforts.

I've been thinking how to enter the medical space with software.

My cousin has EDS, diagnosing the illness is pretty trivial. It took her 15+ years and when she was diagnosed she was already in severe decline. She could have been diagnosed a decade ago but some doctors just have no interest in googling symptoms and listening to patients.

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

#160
post #137
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the US isn't "healthcare based on your wealth". You have Medicaid for the poor, heavily subsidized Obamacare for the people who don't get it through their employer (hello $100/month plan!) and Medicare for the retired. I mean my cousin in the US whose kid has cystic fibrosis get better care through Medicaid than our other cousin in Canada who can't even get access to the latest drugs.

I don't think anyone that says this has actually been poor and needed medical care.

You just have to stay very poor. If you do anything to move up a little bit in life, the benefits stop and you are on your own.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/your-assets-magi-and-medicaid...

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