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YC: Requests for Startups

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514 points sarimkx | 2 comments | 14 Feb 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.41s | source
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CalChris ◴[14 Feb 24 22:10 UTC] No.39376282[source]▶
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.

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1. arbuge ◴[15 Feb 24 14:54 UTC] No.39383359[source]▶
It does sound strange to me. Other countries have much lower healthcare costs per capita than the US. They achieved that without any need for groundbreaking VC-funded startups. Perhaps there are some lower-hanging fruits here.
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2. dragonwriter ◴[15 Feb 24 15:03 UTC] No.39383469[source]▶
The US has a lot higher labor costs than nost other countries and healthcare is labor intensive, per capita costs should be higher ib the US.

OTOH, US costs are higher than that would explain, much higher than most other countries on a share of GDP basis even. So, yeah, there's some low hanging fruit, much of it in public policy around healthcare financing.