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…
What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill
21–30 of 96 posts
Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill
#22This 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…
Playing fast and loose with insurance claims sounds more like outright fraud.
Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill
#23The 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
#24Urgh American health care is just so weird. It makes my skin crawl.
Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill
#25Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill
#26The 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…
Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill
#27The 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…
Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill
#28The 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
#29Re: What Happens When a Healthcare Startup Leaves You With the Bill
#30I 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…
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.