Fighting bad capitalism with good capitalism in healthcare, company idea? | Hacker News Reader

Fighting bad capitalism with good capitalism in healthcare, company idea?

1 pointkrautt4 comments

I FIRE'd a few years back from tech and spend too much time watching the news.

it occurred to me that the answer to cracking the health insurer monopoly was liberating the information not available to the buyers. Why not build a website/app to allow the insured to upload detailed information about their maladies and how their insurer handled it? result of data corpus, processed through a data pipeline, would be grades and statistics and maybe advice for handling denials from particular insurers, grades on insurers based on expected future maladies (family history), etc.

i know this would be a hipaa mess and legal swamp. i do think you could sell advertisments and strongly encourage site users to do business with those insurers as they were part of the 'good fight'

I was a data scientist, python, cybersecurity guy. i've never built a front end or did web app dev. also not a laywer. i could start the pipeline dev though.

any lawyers/webdevs interested in this? I retired at 50 and could start back up on this now.

There is no good capitalism in the health insurance field. Every dollar of revenue that goes to the insurer is a dollar not going to patient care. Best case you're a friendly parasitic middleman.

must not have been clear then. what's bad about a site you can log in to and share your information so that it helps others? and provides you with information and data that allows you to make better, more well-informed decisions for you and your loved ones? that's absolutely good by any rational standard, no question about it.

As a user, there is zero chance I'd be comfortable with uploading detailed health information about myself anywhere. That's just too sensitive and personal to share.

I'm also not convinced that such a database of information would be terribly useful, at least in the US. Although I don't know, I'm totally open to being corrected here.

What decisions would I be able to change based on it?

I think you're well intentioned and I appreciate that, but the biggest problems with health insurance/healthcare in the US are so well entrenched I don't think it can be fixed short of tearing it down and rebuilding. My suggestion would be to reach out to a law firm you trust and go over your ideas to see if they'd be viable.

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