YC: Requests for Startups

ELIMINATING MIDDLEMEN IN HEALTHCARE

by creating another middleman in healthcare. This was first proposed by Jim Clark's Healtheon. "We want to empower the doctors and the patients and get all the other assholes out of the way." … "Except for us. One asshole in the middle." — The New New Thing, Michael Lewis.

The reason we spend so much is that public healthcare is a public good and private companies aren't good at managing public goods. They're good at making money which is a different purpose (which has probably served most people reading this very well). We need Single Payer. Indeed we have Single Payer in Medicare and TriCare and other areas. It works pretty well. We need to eliminate middlemen in healthcare by actually eliminating rent seeking middlemen in healthcare.

The healthcare industry will never be "revolutionized" by just a few million dollars in venture funding. The core revenue backbone of healthcare is not healthcare itself, but rather "bureaucracy as a service." A true revolution in healthcare would involve a brutally simplified exposure of costs and impact, divided between each individual element and organization in the invoice.

No country in the world can address this without a government organization. You start by telling patients where their money goes in a transparent way and which organizations benefit from it. That is it.

The problem is the trust aspect of this level of transparency. There is so much money (large insurance and healthcare groups) and chaos (biotech stocks), making it extremely difficult for businesses to be reliable to individuals as a business. To run a business, you need money, and to operate a business like this, you need an unconditional amount of money for the long term. VCs can take care of the unconditional giving of money, but they are never long-term. They will badger the investee to join the darkside of healthcare because they need an answer in 5 years of series A whether the startup is going to be a unicorn or not.