I think the reason we (maybe secretly) take so much satisfaction / schadenfreude at this story is that someone who was so hyped and the darling of Silicon Valley got so much funding and attention. While others who toil away on good ideas, without nearly so many connections and silver spoons, struggle to even get 1 minute of air time with the kind of funders and backers that she got. That, plus seeing the cluelessness…
FWIW, I had never heard of Theranos until they came up in the news with all these issues (and I read HN every day).
June of 2014 there was a massive press roll out for Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. You couldn't go anywhere, or look at a magazine rack, without seeing her face.
Or maybe some folks feel relieved to have their mental models for actual reality validated. Folks who thought it smelled like vaporware at best, or BS at worst, may not be engaging in schadenfreude so much as "Ha! I knew it! I'm not crazy!" It is possible to have not ugly reasons for finding satisfaction in seeing how this is turning out.
Good point. For me it's not exactly schadenfreude. I'm ok with hype that turns out to be justified. And I'm mostly resigned to people who go wrong through an excess of enthusiasm and naivete. But when unjustified hype shades into negligence or fraud, I take a rich pleasure in seeing people get their comeuppance. It's not schadenfreude precisely, but more about seeing justice done, about seeing karma fulfilled.
I don't speak German, but I don't know if it ceases being schadenfreude just because you feel that the bad thing that happens is justified. Indeed, the Wikipedia page on the word freely mixes those kinds of examples in their page.
I'm not trying to be confrontational here, but recently I've been having a fairly negative reaction to the happy feelings that occur when justice is served. Sometimes I think this fuels a search for justice, where punishment is almost a desired goal from the beginning. The OP also discussed the feeling of satisfaction that their world view is justified when someone gets punished. Without trying to ascribe any intent to the OP, I get very bad vibes out of relentless searches for justice where the punishment of those caught fuels a reinforcement that a certain world view is correct.
Of course this is completely blowing these feelings up out of proportion, but from small seeds grow tall trees. I have lately wondered if justice is really something we should not try to pursue.
> Someone out there needs to attack healthcare. All the attacking that needs to be done is political/social, not technical. Want to attack healthcare? Strip middlemen out so that the money flows to providers and researchers (Single payer + pouring additional money into the NIH/NSF, with the results being public domain). All of these YC startups I see "hacking" healthcare (Dr Chrono, HealthSherpa, etc) are just bandai…
Single Payer would be great if you can trust the uh, payer. But our government is delightfully corrupt, so I'm sure a lot of people with more rare medical conditions would end up with worse treatment than they can get now.
Is it actually corrupt? I hear a lot of hot air about the USG being corrupt, but I almost never hear about quid pro quo scandals... just politicians asking for money because their constituents demand expensive campaigns. We don't like what the government does sometimes, e.g. NSA etc, but I think we have an honest disagreement with them on the best way to protect the country (though they use shady tactics to get their way).
Essentially, it looks to me like government is incentivized to do their job, and most of the problems are due to the way people vote (though gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement schemes like voter ID are a big problem). The soon as voters change their tune, politicians flip on a dime. I've seen it time and again.
So that said, I'm tired of this corruption meme. Can we talk about implementing good systems instead of assuming other people are out to get us?
Here is a good factual overview of why Single Payer won't make health care cheap in the US: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-30/single-paye...
My post never said it would be cheap. It would ensure 1) everyone was covered and 2) less funds were skimmed out by health insurance companies, leaving more funding to be used for health providers. It would also help if a republican Congress didn't require Medicare to _not_ negotiate on drug pricing with for-profit drug companies. Way to leach off the public teat "small government party".
I prefer to make the distinction between Corporatism vs. Capitalism in these type of discussions. Corparatism, the big companies and governments as a symbiotic unit, not Capitalism is the problem. I have lived in Montreal with its public health care system for a year, and I now live in a rice farming village in East Java, Indonesia with their public healthcare system, and I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, so I speak from my experience and what knowledge I have acquired. Sure, you can go to the doctors here in East Java, and pay $1 to $2, and walk away with 3 or 4 prescriptions, but I am not sure that is good for several reasons. People go without even a thought to thinking about their ailment or complaint. The doctor doesn't do more than listen, and possibly listen with a stethiscope, and then prescribe generic medications to treat the oral complaint. I have seen my father-in-law come back with 7 medications due to high blood pressure. I checked it with my portable monitor, and he does have high blood pressure. They prescribed a blood thinner, an antacid, and bunch of other meds you would see as possible prescriptions. My twelve year old niece had a blood test at school, and her cholesterol was a bit high. Result: 3 prescriptions, and not a lot about diet change or exercise. Lines are longer the closer to the city you get. Here people are there with sore elbows, headaches, etc... These are people who shake off a lot of hard daily work and bruises. They go at a whim when they are not working, and bored, and the simplest of ailments are perceived. I am anxious about the amount of prescriptions handed out, and the quality.
In Montreal, in Spring or in stretches of good weather, there would be lines outside the emergency room. I went and inquired if it was for flu shots, or some other special day since they had setup folding tables and chairs to handle the patient load. The jaded healthcare worker explained this was typical, and made some comment about if somebody sneezes, is bored on unemployment, they head to the emergency room.
My daughter needed surgery back in NJ, USA, while I was in SE Asia, and I thought it was going to cost me $16k to $20K, since my coverage had just expired. I asked how much to pay up front in cash to make sure she could get the surgery, and it turned out that if I paid the hospital, the anaesthesiologist and the surgeron each separately the cost would be and was $5k. I asked why, and I was told by all 3 offices, that this was their real price, and that when it goes through the insurance companies they spend up to a year or more trying to collect, and at a 40% rate or less. The gratitude of me pre-paying in cash, was shocking. They never have that, and it makes for less work for them. They were so thrilled. The hospitals and doctors charge a lot more to make sure they cover the administrative costs of tracking and chasing payments, and to cover the costs of the procedures themselves. I guess that's what you get when you let big companies and government intervention do their thing.
I am sad at this Theranos thing. I do not know about the truth; I guess we shall soon know. I see the idea of disrupting the labs and innovation as a good thing. So I hope guilty completely, partially or not, it has at least challenged the status quo. I know their are smaller quantities of blood testing kits available, not as small as Theranos, but I sure never heard of them before this fiasco. The benefit of reading HN! The conspiracy side of me, urges me to look at big Lab and Pharma as not wanting this to happen, or at least outside of their walls. They will make a slightly more volume blood test work, and now reap the publicity and sell it to the public and government. My Uncle Victor, who upon seeing my drawing of a car running on water buy using a solar cell to perform electolysis on water and exhaust of water back in 1974 (I had just built a solar oven and purchased a small solar cell, too small) spurned the idea, said to me: The big oil companies, or (pardon the racist, parochial remark here relayed) the 'arabs will come after you'. We used to call him Archie Bunker from All in the Family. A very funny show that would cause many to protest if it were on the TV nowadays.
Sweden is always held up as a model of public healthcare, but we forget their financial crisis in the 1990s that started with slow growth once the US ended the gold standard in August 1971. They didn't get out of the 1990s crisis until they started embracing more capitalistic practices, so their healthcare system should not be used as an argument for it to be applied in the US. Not to mention, costs of covering 9.5 million people in a smaller geography, vs. 310 million people in a much larger geography. It is not simply a scaling problem or application.
I think the reason we (maybe secretly) take so much satisfaction / schadenfreude at this story is that someone who was so hyped and the darling of Silicon Valley got so much funding and attention. While others who toil away on good ideas, without nearly so many connections and silver spoons, struggle to even get 1 minute of air time with the kind of funders and backers that she got. That, plus seeing the cluelessness…
It was concept we would have loved to have worked out- super efficient blood testing. Alas, it was too good to be true, or ahead of its time.
Now the serious question is why the founder or board abandon the approach when it did not succeed. That whey the company became shady.
healthcare is a very hard problem. While we in the tech community may find it morbidly entertaining to watch Theranos burn to the ground. Someone out there needs to attack healthcare. The not dying motivation is fairly important.
Healthcare like almost every major enterprise vertical is a wicked problem[1] and these problems are pretty much rife with far more than just technical problems. Most of the VC founded ventures are honestly quite terrible at attacking the Fortune 100 that dominates these verticals including reasons like collusion as well as regulatory capture. A $10M+ series A seems like big money to a lot of the people in tech, in t…
I think the reason we (maybe secretly) take so much satisfaction / schadenfreude at this story is that someone who was so hyped and the darling of Silicon Valley got so much funding and attention. While others who toil away on good ideas, without nearly so many connections and silver spoons, struggle to even get 1 minute of air time with the kind of funders and backers that she got. That, plus seeing the cluelessness…
It's satisfying to see enforcement against frauds, especially when they are so close to your own industry.
I've seen people do sketchy stuff which seemed obviously wrong and publicly apparent for many, many years. Sometimes it finally catches up with them, but other times it does not, and they cash out, are rewarded, and praised by others who have great respect. That is deeply unnerving.
The healthcare industry is quite inefficient at allocating money to things that are needed and have a decent chance of working. For example, in the field of oncology there's very little money put into cheap accurate early screening. And an almost obsessive pour of money into trying to understand mid-to-late stage cancers. Even James Watson has criticized this. It's a sad situation, because we now know early pre-clini…
> For example, in the field of oncology there's very little money put into cheap accurate early screening. And an almost obsessive pour of money into trying to understand mid-to-late stage cancers. Even James Watson has criticized this. I'm in no way an expert, but isn't part of that related to increasing evidence that early detection of a tumor isn't necessarily a benefit? I recall reading many tumors stop or grow s…
It depends on the type of cancer. For instance, a surprisingly large portion of the population likely has thyroid cancer and doesn't know it, and many have it and it isn't treated. It's a very slow-growing cancer usually, and just not worth bothering with until the tumor gets large enough to cause real problems due to its size (then they usually just cut out part of your thyroid, leaving the other part to continue working as normal, or at worst they cut out the whole thyroid and you have to take a Synthroid pill every day).
Other cancers, like pancreatic cancer, are very aggressive so the earlier you catch them the better.
I would think early screening would discriminate by type of cancer so you can see if you have something that needs immediate attention.
I wonder why WSJ went so aggressively against Theranos. (Not that I'm complaining.) Does anyone know the backstory there?
Basically, it looks like one reporter starting pulling at the thread, and the whole sweater fell apart. I wouldn't really say they went after Theranos aggressively until they realized there was a much bigger story.