Live data from Hacker News

What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

omnifeed.com

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#21

This seems similar to third-party warranty companies. They offer full coverage for low amounts, but when the time comes for them to pay up, they're impossible to deal with. Can't reach them on the phone, they need things to be faxed(!) over, and then because of so-and-so reason, it won't be covered. Healthcare shouldn't be handled by startups. Its too expensive and there's too much riding on it for something that cou…

Can you buy a good after-market warranty? I mean the dealers must be getting their first-party warranties from somewhere.

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#22

This seems similar to third-party warranty companies. They offer full coverage for low amounts, but when the time comes for them to pay up, they're impossible to deal with. Can't reach them on the phone, they need things to be faxed(!) over, and then because of so-and-so reason, it won't be covered. Healthcare shouldn't be handled by startups. Its too expensive and there's too much riding on it for something that cou…

I've talked to a couple health-care startups on the East Coast that have started by tackling one small aspect of healthcare and built off of that. Prescription drug tracking. OR procedures and checklists. There are tons of companies in the medical startup space that are doing good work, there are tons of areas that traditional big tech companies have failed to innovate in that are ripe for being upset.

Playing fast and loose with insurance claims sounds more like outright fraud.

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#23
The problem with insurance companies is that they are fundamentally conflicted. As for-profit businesses they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. Unfortunately the only way to maximize profits is to decline coverage.

The problem with Obamacare is that it does nothing to fix this problem. Who wants to be the guy responsible for that many lost jobs?? So, instead they propped up the insurance companies and made everything more complicated for everyone.

The only solutions I see are to have non-profit insurance companies or a single payer system.

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#24
"So I went to my new Oscar-­approved doctor, who recommended routine blood work. The hospital called up Oscar and Oscar's operations department assured both the in-­hospital labs and administrators that this blood work would be covered by my plan so we went ahead with it."

Urgh American health care is just so weird. It makes my skin crawl.

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#25
This story seams par for the course when dealing with insurance companies regardless of if it's startup or not. I've had the same exact issue with everyone from "United" to "Humana" and more recently "HealthNet" You will be told something is in network and it's not, a lab location is listed on their website as in network and then they claim it's not covered later. Sadly, this seems to be an area where legislation needs to bring out the big stick and force them to cover services that they had listed as "in-network" bad data is no excuse.

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#26

The problem with insurance companies is that they are fundamentally conflicted. As for-profit businesses they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. Unfortunately the only way to maximize profits is to decline coverage. The problem with Obamacare is that it does nothing to fix this problem. Who wants to be the guy responsible for that many lost jobs?? So, instead they propped up the insurance companies…

well said! what do you mean by single payer system?

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#27

The problem with insurance companies is that they are fundamentally conflicted. As for-profit businesses they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. Unfortunately the only way to maximize profits is to decline coverage. The problem with Obamacare is that it does nothing to fix this problem. Who wants to be the guy responsible for that many lost jobs?? So, instead they propped up the insurance companies…

Many of the insurance companies are non-profits, but that doesn't help much. http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2017460805_surplus09m...

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#28
post #26

The problem with insurance companies is that they are fundamentally conflicted. As for-profit businesses they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. Unfortunately the only way to maximize profits is to decline coverage. The problem with Obamacare is that it does nothing to fix this problem. Who wants to be the guy responsible for that many lost jobs?? So, instead they propped up the insurance companies…

well said! what do you mean by single payer system?

Single-payer health care is a system in which the government, rather than private insurers, pays for all health care costs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#29
From the Oscar front page: "Free doctor visits via phone". WTF is this? How can a doctor visit by phone? All this story is just a smell on how deeply broken the entire US health system is (together with all the healthcare-systems of 3rd world countries).

Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill

#30

I had a conversation with a friend recently who was a doctor. He was telling me that he had 3 patients in a fairly short period of time that had come in with mysterious symptoms (they were all in their 70's) and that had died soon after being admitted. While he knew that he had technically done everything by the book to treat them, he worried that he had made a mistake along the way that possibly could have been the…

Absolutely.

I've been in healthcare for a bunch of years (I dunno, sheesh, I guess like 14?). For a big stint of that I built systems that aim to prevent medication errors in hospitals by telling clinicians when doses were due, etc.

I know of at least two incidents where code that I wrote failed in a way that (due to some edge-case concurrency in one case, and daylight savings time in another case) didn't make it clear to a nurse that another nurse had given a medication to a patient and the patient received a double-dosage of a pretty severe drug.

Imagine getting that call. It's every bit as fucking terrible and humbling as you'd think.

Far more numerous (thankfully) were the calls that we got reporting that we stopped double dosages or even order-of-magnitude label misreadings on drugs. I know of more than a handful of instances that code I wrote may have literally saved a life.

I've been lucky to have found myself at companies that take this stuff really, really seriously. It's a really hard balance to strike when failure is as devastating as it can be in healthcare, but the status quo is pretty terrifying also. In general every health IT shop's culture finds some balance between making decisions based on fear, and trying to achieve a velocity that allows problems to be fixed quickly and the greatest positive impact possible against the problem they're solving.

I talk to a lot of people who want to work on "big/real problems" and list "healthcare" as one of them but when it comes down to it are often pretty freaked out about the stakes. It's weird to be used to the gravity of it, I certainly am now. I can't even wrap my head around what it would mean to work on something that doesn't hurt people when it fails.

Post reply on HN