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The Hollow Men of Hims

(www.alexkesin.com)
199 points quadrin | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 22:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.458s | source
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alphazard ◴[26 Jun 25 00:57 UTC] No.44383247[source]▶
Given the healthcare bureaucracy in America, it's hard to find anything for the consumer to be mad about here other than the quality of the medications. The intended audience of this article must be pharma and healthcare investors, not consumers.

As with most products, companies need a way to make promises to consumers about what's in the products. The only way the consumers will believe those promises is if the consequences for lying are severe. Clearly room for improvement here, maybe some of these 3rd party certification labs can start putting their seals on medications too.

The article mentions that medication from China isn't part of an FDA approved supply chain, but as a consumer I don't really care about that. I'd rather have mass spectrometry data on the side of the tin than the FDA's blessing.

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CSMastermind ◴[26 Jun 25 04:11 UTC] No.44384120[source]▶
I see a lot of complaints about "the healthcare bureaucracy in America".

And I don't doubt that it exists. But I will say the limited number of times I've needed to interact with the system it was surprisingly cheap and downright pleasant.

The only negative experiences I've had is interacting with government run health systems (the VA).

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1. potato3732842 ◴[26 Jun 25 13:39 UTC] No.44387306[source]▶
Yeah, they're real good at doing needless work with a smile on their face.

Next time you go to a GP's office for no reason other than to gatekeep a specialist you know you need ask yourself what all those people are being paid for any why the situation deserves anything more than someone on the order of an RN saying "yeah looks like an infection to me" via a screen, to pick but one example.

Like all bureaucracy, every single part of the system has some skin deep reason to justify its existence or scope but when you take a step back and look at it all you'll find that huge swaths are either redundant or completely unnecessary, and that the industry is rife with this BS from top to bottom and we're all made effectively poorer for it.

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2. mindslight ◴[26 Jun 25 15:43 UTC] No.44388496[source]▶
You might not even notice it just from dealing with one referral. It really starts to gall when you see the pattern of nearly every actor in the system doing the least amount possible and then quickly passing responsibility on to someone else, often via yourself. The only exceptions I've seen are hospital doctors when there is an immediate acute problem that they can't just punt, and pediatrics where frequent repeating followups can be justified. Healthcare workers join this system because they want to help people, but the administrative parasites grind up their attention into tiny pieces until it is all but meaningless.