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Comment by entangld | Hacker News Reader

His $1500 dollar startup is just the store front for his $100k+ medical education. There is already a staggering demand for any and all medical services.

Not as innovative as the headline made it sound.

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What's interesting about the economics of all this is that the cost of an office and staff overhead is now greater than the benefit from taking insurance. Complexity has benefits but it also has a cost that tends to deliver negative marginal returns after a certain point and the U.S health care insurance industry passed that point long ago.

No, not in general but only for this one particular doctor. He is basically providing the simplest of medical services to the most well-paying patients. This is a teeny tiny market, one whose consumers' needs and means are not reflective of the average consumer of medical care. He may have success doing this in two zip codes in a metropolitan area, but this business can't be replicated to any meaningful scale.

I don't think one or two hundred a visit is very much higher than in any other context.

It's not a high amount for that type of service. I was referring to the ability to pay the entirety of it, presumably up front, and the willingness to do so in some cases despite having insurance.

The more significant of the two points I made was the type of cases he could possibly be seeing. The article refers to only the most basic of equipment such as an otoscope, no mention of a lab (for blood chemistry, bacterial tests, etc), so it's hard to see how he could handle only the absolute simplest of cases.

Essentially he is practicing medicine the way it was done in a previous era. It's not really "innovative", a better term would be "retro" or "throwback".

I'm not particularly well informed on the issue, but a local doctor who would prefer to make house visits like in the old days, informed me that the hindrance wasn't taking insurance, but liability. According to him America is too litigious these days to visit people in their house, and the cost of malpractice insurance for home visits was prohibitive.

The innovation is the method of delivery of that $100k medical education. The article actually sold me.

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