Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

I bought one of these and sent in the kit. I never got the results, they said there was a technical glitch IIRC and I needed to do it again, but everything up until that point was really well done. This was probably 2016-2017.

I have no other details, other than I don’t think the alleged crimes committed by them or Theranos are nearly as bad as the ones committed by big pharma and uspto and the rest of the healthcare industry. The whole thing is an f’ing sad joke. So I guess my $200 for the ubiome went down the tube, but what about the $1,800 that HMSA just tried to bill me for going to the doctor for a COVID test last February? How about the 500,000 lives lost to the opioid epidemic? Are any feds investigating USPTO, who was Purdue’s partner in crime? Nah, don’t think so. Let’s go after some small fish in the pond instead.

I blame the 30 something entrepreneurs who grew up in this toxic space a lot less than the 60 year old healthcare execs and government officials who created our f’d up system that we are all suffering from.

If you want to avoid the mistakes of both Theranos, uBiome, and big pharma here's the key strategy: avoid secrecy and #imaginaryProperty at all costs. It puts the patients last and is bad for the world.

This is a terrible take. The people who made the decision to commit fraud are the ones at fault.

I was excited by the Theranos idea. I was excited by the uBiome idea (and even attempted to be a customer!). But obviously both went poof. I want to know how this could happen. What are the bigger problems in the industry? If you think these 2 are rare examples, I would call them minor compared to many of the companies in the space.

Common factors seem to be: secrecy, and sticking to the old mindset of #ImaginaryProperty business models (patents, ndas, copyrights, et cetera).

I want to see the visions espoused by Theranos and uBiome come to fruition. There are *not* a lot of great examples of good biotech companies to emulate. AFAIK, there hasn't been a "don't be evil" moment in biotech.

Some biotech/healthcare company needs to come out and say "fck the old ways, they aren't working—Americans are not healthier, costs are up, and we still haven't solved cancer", and take a radical new approach of openness, collaboration, and forget about the abosolute horsesht practices of secrecy, #imaginaryproperty, and putting patients far down on the list of priorities.

Given the cost of developing a single drug can be in the billions of dollars, what financial incentive is there for companies to spend so much on R&D and clinical development if there is no commercial exclusivity rights at the end of the pipeline? You could nationalise drug development but that is a lot of risk to burden the taxpayer with.

What financial incentive is there for drug companies to ever cure anything when instead they can just develop drugs that alleviate symptoms, which you must then purchase in-perpetuity?

This is the best retort. I'm going to start using this, thanks.

The one I usually go with is "It actually costs $1T to develop a drug. $999B in basic research paid by US taxpayers and $1B in just enough frivolous novelty for the bigpharma company to get a patent racket going".

I’m not sure you have great insights as to how the biotech market operates today because the basis of your arguments aren’t really factual.

“Haven't solved cancer”? Come on man!

This reads like the commentary about Manafort's "otherwise blameless life." They failed to send you the results and you say you're out $200 that you paid. What else is there for them to have done "really well"?

“ but what about” - a quote from your reply: does that ring a bell to you about why your argument seems specious at best or misleading at worst?

I think this could be an instance of the fallacy fallacy. Just because what about arguments are often unwarranted doesn't mean they are in every case. In particular, the health care and pharma industries are driving up the cost of doing business, so it's fair to ask why there's a scandal when a startup accidentally misleads and overcharges, while it's business as usual for Big Medicine?

https://effectiviology.com/fallacy-fallacy/

While cute, this is false. "Argument from fallacy" is the fallacy whereby you assert that the conclusion is false because the reasoning is false. GP doesn't assert that the conclusion is necessarily false, and in fact very specifically qualifies his language to the reasoning. Webster's gives "fallacious" as a synonym for "specious."

I'm pretty tired of everyone yelling "Whataboutism!" all the time.

Just because it's a tactic used by shills doesn't mean whenever the point is made it's shilling / irrelevant.

Sometimes it's actually worthwhile to point out when an instance of behavior is actually part of a much larger, much bigger problem.

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