Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018?
What business would you start in 2018?
This creates a win-win for all 3 parties. Consumers don't have to pay crazy health insurance premiums (which can be 15K easily for a family of 4 per year), pricing is transparent and even though they pay out of pocket for general services, the total they will spend per year will be MUCH less than average insurance premiums we pay today in the United States. Not to mention that insurance companies don't get to butt in every decision about which service should have been covered and which one not. Doctor gives a bill, patient pays it and all done. Probably will put some medical billing companies out of business too ? Doctors/clinics/hospitals get a cut of the premium from every consumer who participates effectively creating a huge pool/network.
Bonus feature: Our company will create a centralized platform where consumers can login and see their doctor visits and billing all in one place. No more individual health insurance websites or doctor billing websites. I can get a simple statement at the end of the year even if I visited 20 different doctors.
How we make money though with those lower yearly premiums will be a challenge. Btw, this was just a joke and a wishlist. I wish someone would do this.
Car insurance doesn’t pay oil changes because that’s a normal part of owning a car and thus should be budgeted for, but a crash isn’t — this insurance exists to make someone whole after a covered loss.
Rather than "insurance", a better model is that "you'll need to spend a lot with p approaching 1, for some years of your life". So allocating each person a lifetime fixed pool of money (through the tax system) might be a good way to force some cost discipline onto the system, while still ensuring coverage and access are widespread.
What I like about this is that it makes explicit, society's commitment to sharing some of the burden of care. I have a close friend whose wife has Crohn's. It's a real bitch of a disease, essentially no known cure, chronic, you just try to get it "managed" as well as possible. We could probably spend an infinite amount of money trying to improve her quality of life, but that's not fair to society at large. So if we said, here, you get $x, that would encourage the medical system to provide cost-effective management options that would be within some bounded price range everyone agrees would be reasonable.
I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's precisely the conversation we need to be having.
This is only a thing in the US.
In the countries with sane public health systems, they have zero problem saying "Look, we've got this much money to spend, we think this way of spending it gets the most bang (roughly speaking, QALY's) for buck, so if you want more coverage hit up the private insurance market" [1].
And you know what, those private insurance markets work great because they actually have to provide meaningful value beyond the public system in order for consumers to bother using them.
As a vaguely relevant side note: Goddam it's difficult for me not to get angry about the diabolical state of the health system in the US and I don't even live there. There should be marches on the streets about this. You could radically improve the lives of the vast majority of 300 million people without spending an extra cent of government money on health if you just stopped being so goddam dumb about it [2].
[1] For instance, here is the website of the public pharmaceutical supplier in my country-- NZ-- who've hired lots of phys and maths grads I know: https://www.pharmac.govt.nz/about/your-guide-to-pharmac/fact....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
But that is "communist" and so Americans as a whole could never agree to it. They'd rather squeeze every last day out of someone rich, even with a low or negative quality of life impact, and let the poor die early.
I don't live there and it makes me mad too. It fails the Rawlsian test of ethics (veil of ignorance), which I think is a good way to decide on political issues.
There’s a doctor in my city that started his own practice with a monthly subscription fee and covering basic care.
http://journalstar.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/health/linc...
Can't wait to share here in a 2-4 months.
People signup for their favorite hospital. The hospital gets MRR. You set your primary care physician and other providers. They get MRR too per patient who's picked them.
Patient pays 4-6% of their monthly income for insurance.
When patient travels, their local hospital foots the bills. Hopefully this goes national and it lowers costs -- hospitals would negotiate with each other for lower costs instead of insurance companies. They would also have a centralized uniform billing (the biz) that joins everything together and is the glue. As a result each hospital no longer needs medical billers.
Hospitals could join forces to also negotiate in bulk the price of prescription drugs and keep those costs down as well. Since it's income based everyone could afford it, so it's basically privatized universal healthcare.
Convincing fake video and audio is coming soon - it isn't a major problem yet, but it will be more challenging to determine if recorded evidence can actually be relied on.
Some sort of service that signs and proves the authenticity of videos I think is a an idea that was until recently probably bad, but has now became good.
It'd be similar to what digicert does for websites. You could then work with browsers to show verification for trusted videos.
I don't think that is even possible.
You might want to succeed with amateur efforts, but I would guess there will be a point where it is impossible to tell if a video is fake or not.
Company would be responsible for effectively verifying identity - similar to how this is done for websites.
In an age with surveillance everywhere and when video and audio are so important in litigation I would make a tamper-proof camera that would sign every video/audio it produces. Tricky part would be to keep the signing key away from bad hands.
Create a platform like facebook or github for teachers to collaborate on planning an entire unit. At the moment each teacher does it alone or maybe a department may get together and create some content.
But there are thousands of schools tens of thousands of teachers, all of them building lessons and delivering them.
Build in testing. assignments. progress. etc.
Also, a social enterprise-based reforestation project – I'll be using same savings to buy a piece of deforested ex-farmland (one in particular) and working with friends and local community to return it to its former forested glory. The goal is really to give back but also to learn a heap about land management and permaculture.
For-profit and non-profit, respectively.
So it's really businesses that scratch my own itch.
Self driving cars are still years ahead, besides that, humans will still be needed for other kinds of gigs for some time.
I really think education is a very inefficient process currently. Not that it doesn't allow growth of other traits which it doesn't value but also the virtues which it does see fit remain undeveloped.
For starters, I will begin with a program like 'Computer science/ concepts for developers' which will go far further than Networking, OS, DB...
The most important part of it would be that it will specifically crafted for the individual- it will start with the level of expertise the learner is at and incrementally go up.
Secondly, it will be focusing on virtues which imo makes learning efficient and enjoyable- like pressure free learning but getting sense of accomplishment by doing stuff. The best reason one would be learning for would be for themselves.
Then use this identification system to create a crypto-currency that has guaranteed basic income built in, and the person would need to re-verify every 6 months to keep their account.
The not-for-profit company would also start it's own businesses that provide products/services to consumers and use only local fiat + the ubi-coin for payment with maybe benefits for using crypto over fiat (to increase adoption).
Execs for all businesses would be capped at 125x average worker salary. All left over money at end of fiscal year would be divided up evenly and 30% would go to workers as a bonus, 70% would be dispersed to ubi coin holders evenly. Businesses the co-op could start could be grocers, mail-order pharmacy, insurance companies, cell phone providers, the goal being --be self-sufficient but not make a profit except enough to pay all workers, and reward the community as a whole and also make services people use everyday cheaper and more affordable.
There's no denying that something gets lost on a Zoom/WebEx/other conference call - attendees are distracted, miscommunications happen, and people have to be assertive to get their message across. This can be overcome by a small team that is 110% driven in their goal, but it's a model that can't be adapted by all industries/sizes/cultures.
I'm still not sure what the solution to this is, but I think there will be a dramatic paradigm shift. Maybe the trigger will be VR or some disruptor we already see coming, but it may be something more approachable.
All of those tools you listed are CRUD-based. I think the space would benefit from something more reactive, where multiple people can "play" on the same screen.
I think part of a solution to that problem is more deliberate communication. Water cooler talk, informal office conversations, whatever you want to call those, while occasionally helpful they can also lead to the creation of information silos between the people participating in these conversations.
The constraint of not having the opportunity to engage in this kind of conversations might actually be beneficial. Distributed teams force you to communicate more efficiently and more purposefully.
If anyone is currently experiencing this issue, I would absolutely love to talk to you! I only have a really rudimentary site up right now at http://hallwayapp.com if anyone is even remotely curious (no pun intended).
It can get a little slow for larger boards – we did multiple weeks of branding iteration in a single board with hundreds of images and sticky notes – but overall I'd highly recommend it.
If you could innovate something minor in that field, I'm talking something that impacts maybe 5% of the shipping process, that's an absurdly big market.
However, don't do like the airlines and build your business plan on having exclusive agreements with nice and naive governments. Once that special treatment stops and they let smaller players in party's over.
Looking for enough funding to work on this (just to cover life expenses US1000/month)
(It's my dream to build something here too.)
There is also Sentinel2 (which is 10m) that can be used commercially.
Obviously DigitalGlobe (and recently Planet) do better with <1m resolution but it seems to be more expensive and (sub)licensing might be non-trivial (at least they are vague in pricing details).
IME, there's also a significant overlap between the execs that insist "2 years isn't enough time to get compliant" and execs that ignored it for the last 2 years. Not sure what that means, but it's at the point where I write off timeline complaints as whining and lack of forethought.
Imagine you have a fleet of vehicles and one of your drivers just had a fender-bender or seen one occur. One or both of the involved parties will call the police and notify insurance agencies. Sometimes the evidence, as deemed by you to favor your situation can get moved around or shuffled by local authorities. With my service, you'll be able to post as many pictures or videos as you like of the actual event. Our in-vehicle dash-cams will also collaborate the information you're uploading. The complete offering and system helps you secure a better insurance rate saving you millions. I just need $4.5MM to get started.
#2
This one has an even greater return. Imagine REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. It will do really well!