Slashdot Mirror
Report: Feds To Ban Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes For 2 Years (cbsnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to the Wall Street Journal, health regulators have proposed pulling the federal license for the company's California laboratory and banning its founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, and company president Sunny Balwani from the blood-testing business for two years. The letter which the WSJ cited in its report found that Theranos had not corrected problems at its lab in Newark, California, and faced possible sanctions as a result. In October 2015, the WSJ reported all but one of Theranos' analyzers in use were off the shelf, and that their tiny samples may not always have been accurate. The company was facing allegations of data manipulation in late December 2015. Earlier this year, U.S. regulators found serious deficiencies at Theranos' laboratory in Newark, California, putting the company's relationship with the Medicare program in danger. Theranos has said that The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has not imposed sanctions on its Newark Lab. "Due to the comprehensive nature of the corrective measures we've taken over the past several months, which has been affirmed by several experts, we are hopeful that CMS won't impose sanctions," the company said in an emailed statement. "But if they do, we will work with CMS to address all of their concerns."
Anyone who has the least bit of common sense could have told you she's a fraud. She has yet to submit her process to anyone else for confirmation it does what it says it does, her own company has been relying more and more on standard tests rather than their supposed "miracle" process, and companies which have been using her service have been dropping her and going back to what is known to work.
I remember seeing her listed as one of those youngest self-made billionaires and all I could think was how much she's pulled the wool over on everyone. I can't wait for the lawsuits to come flying in.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
...I had hoped that the technology was really valid.
When investors are willing to place a $9B valuation on a tech unicorn that is so secretive nobody even knows what their actual product is or whether it even works.
How about putting her in jail for fraud? Jesus.
It's possible this is an Enron type scam, but I think it's more likely that Holmes kept thinking they were on the verge of the big breakthrough, and was able to sell that to lots of investors who should've done more homework. It's like Curt Schilling with 38 Studios, the video game maker that convinced the state of Rhode Island to cosign $75 million in loans in exchange for relocating there and hiring hundreds of engineers.
What an embarrassment, not just that a company gets banned from providing health services, but that the misrepresentations and malpractices rise to a level so severe that a CEO gets personally banned from the industry. And for the COO (Sunny Balwani) who was threatening low level employees for telling the truth, may he never be employed again by anyone who knows better.
Perhaps it was a case of having too much fame too soon, and feeling the pressure to lie to cover the failures/shortcoming? If only the truth and exposure had come sooner. There are plenty of entrepreneurs and good ideas out there that deserve the publicity + funding that she got, but didn't because they weren't so well connected.
Why not life in jail? How does the whore get to keep millions of dollars for doing nothing and giving people fake health data?
It may be possible that Theranos has been experiencing problems because one or more of the entrenched interests in the pharm industry wants to slow the company down so they can catch up and come up with competing products with a known brand name. Such move would cause the talent to jump ship and thus sink the startup. Or, they are simply trying to sink the company to extend their present business plan(s). This is more probable than Theranos and Holmes et. al. being frauds. If such were the case, you would have seen a few billion $ and the leadership missing shortly after the IPO.
The ACA didn't actually change the privateness of the healthcare system. It didn't nationalize anything. It simply implemented some minor regulatory reforms, coupled with insurance mandates and major regulatory reforms on insurers, and made more subsidies available.
So it really isn't relevant here one way or another.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
oops, those were laws.
The story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes have been covered at length at, how shall I put it, "other places" on the Web.
Many of us here on Slashdot toil away at technical jobs in the vain hope of getting paid health coverage or maybe a retirement plan, forget about becoming wealthy let alone famous. Then there are these techies who get hyped as the "Next Steve Jobs" or "the most influential tech entrepreneurs under age 30" and we read their stories in a mixture of wonderment, envy, and resentment of why-am-I-stuck-what-I-am-doing-without-the-least-recognition-from-anyone. Elizabeth Holmes is one of those people you read about.
So yes, there is an Internet full of envious would-be critics who look at her story and all of the hype surrounding her company and personal success story and migrate from asking "Why no me?" to "WTF?" as scrutiny and skepticism gets crowd-sourced far and wide across the Web.
One question is "Here is this blonde-babe tech wunderkind" and "why are the board members of her company all of these wash-up geezers from the Industrial-Government Complex", including such personages as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and others. Not that there is anything wrong with a woman tech entrepreneur not looking and acting like Amy on the Big Bang Theory, but what is the deal with all of these old-dude Republicans not known for having any particular insights into bio-tech? The explanation is that these are friends and neighbors of Ms. Holmes parents. OK, this is starting to swing the discussion among people regarding "why are there not more women in technical fields" and asking "is it nature or nurture", and the explanation swings to "connections."
I guess that sort of speculation is the domain of borderline of not outright racist-sexist "alt-Right" Web sites. But these sites links to commentary that might be respectable.
There is this dude from France named Jean-Louis Gassee -- you may have heard of him if you are old enough, he was once an Apple Computer bigwig around the time of the Mac-II introduction. His technical interest is in computers rather than in bio-tech, but he has a rather personal interest in blood testing owing to suffering from a rare chronic blood disorder only known to James-Bond film villains. His body produces too many red blood cells and he has to take medicine to counteract this, and if frequent monitoring blood tests show that is blood count is getting too high, the doctors need to bleed him to remove a pint at a time (it gets thrown away because suffering from this illness, the health authorities disqualify him as a blood donor). If you wanted some senior person on the board of a company like this, he may be your man, or maybe not because he asks too many questions.
So what Monsieur Gassee does is have his blood tested, both at conventional medical labs and through Theranos at his local Silicon-Valley Walgreens. He finds that conventional labs at least give consistent readings between different times of testing, but the Theranos results fluctuate all over the place. Accuracy is important to his medical condition because if he lets too many red cells pile up, his internal organs could shut down.
So as to probability and giving Ms. Holmes and Theranos the benefit-of-the-doubt at this point, that may be "water over the dam" right now.
Gassee's blog musings draws out a lot of commentary from people who seem to know about blood testing -- such as people who draw blood for medical labs as opposed to former Secretaries of State under Republican Administrations. Theranos' "disruptive business model" is using only the drop of blood from a "finger stick" as used by diabetics for blood sugar monitoring instead of drawing a whole vial from a vein in your arm. These blood-lab techs chime in that the blood you get from your vein is different-in-kind than the drop of blood from the end of your finger. For one thing, the vein blood hasn't been "through the wringer" of being squeezed out through the capillaries in your finger tip. It hasn't h
She's being banned from Federal contracting and participating in anything federally funded. It's called a federal contracting death sentence and it will pretty much end her career in anything involving federal research dollars (which is almost all research). Basically the only research she can participate in during this time frame is something entirely funded by private dollars and there is very little research that is funded like that.
Banning her from black turtlenecks and caked on makeup.
When investors are willing to place a $9B valuation on a tech unicorn that is so secretive nobody even knows what their actual product is or whether it even works.
It's a health care bubble, actually. There's over-investment in the health care sector right now, at least in startup costs.
Of course, there are also massive startup hurdles there for regulatory and bill-payment reasons
The investors around this tried to _construct_ a female Anglo-saxon technology success story... and failed.
There is another story like this: Danielle Fong - "green energy storage" by a woman, so famous people threw a lot of money at it and it waffles around indefinitely. She should legitimately be a researcher working on this at maybe at university or government or corporate lab, not as co-founder of a startup.
Marissa Mayer is this too... installed by delusional religious/political thinking.
And here's what's not this:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2015/04/21/chinese-tech-entrepreneur-is-now-the-worlds-richest-self-made-woman/
http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/china-dominates-the-list-of-the-worlds-richest-women/
Is that embarrassing, that 'patriarchal' China is dominating the 'feminist' West at female entrepreneurship?
Tell that to my friends that lost their plans, and now pay $5k/year(up from $2k/yr) more for private insurance with a higher co-pay, and poorer quality of care, along with reductions in drug coverage.
Om, nomnomnom...
Thats right. Weekends are also terrible socialist ideas
How the hell would that solve the underlying problem?
A big first step would be information transparency. Require doctors to publicly post their prices. Prohibit them from banning patients for posting reviews. Malpractice information, and outcome data should be publicly available.
That's a different group of authorities (and a different standard of proof). They're stopping her from supplying services to the government.
I suppose the state authorities (or FBI or similar) could investigate her for fraud.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
And she was just named as an example of a self-made rich person in another topic here.
Thanks for reminding me, I should have added "criminal" to "inherited".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Perhaps you need a proper national medical scheme then - regardless of what you think of the quality of it, I would much rather live with the NHS here in the UK than have to use the US system.
This woman will spend the rest of her life on boards of directors, working for some private equity firm, and generally gliding through life in positions where she may ore may not actually contribute anything that can be measured. Yet the more "accomplishments" she pads onto her resume the more she will use that resume to clime some other ladder.
But her real contribution will be to sour the milk for any company that wants to actually do what she pretended to be doing. They will go to raise money for a valid, real, not fraudulent product, and their requests will be filed beside cold fusion and madoff investments.
They live in the US. I live in Canada and still pay out the ass for private coverage so I don't go broke. The NHS? That entire fucking scheme is broken, and I don't even want to get started on it.
Om, nomnomnom...
So I was a bit confused.
I knew they didn't stand a chance as soon as they retained David Boies as their legal counsel (despite the conflict of interest, since he sits on their Board). Why on Earth do people think he's some kinda super-lawyer? I mean look at his track record:
Defended Napster (they were shut down).
Convicted Microsoft (overturned on appeal)*
Worked for Al Gore in the 2000 election (he didn't become president)
Represented Andy Fastow from Enron (he went to jail).
Worked for Oracle in their case against Google for Java (Oracle lost).
And let's not forget everybody's favorite, the SCO Group.
I mean he has had some victories, such as defending IBM in their anti-trust case (although he wasn't the primary litigator), but I'm sure whatever Theranos was paying him was WAY more than what they received in return.
*I know it's complicated, but at the end of the day MS beat the DOJ.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I don't really care what she does, but my God she is HOT!!!
Mod points aren't about whether you agree with the person. Stop abusing the moderation system.
http://undecidedgames.blogspot.com
Random, but I saw your username and thought of this article I saw today -- http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/15/national/mashiki-quake-survivors-describe-terror-homes-collapsed/
Any connection to you?
Any connection to you?
Only in family history.
Om, nomnomnom...
But, the question is, would you rather live on medicare/medicaid/tricare (military medical)/VA than the current commercial system?
It isn't if your government can do it better than commercial, it is if our government can. The government run medical care programs in the US have been terrible, just look at all the scandals the VA has gone through recently:
https://www.google.com/search?...
They had people dying waiting to come in for care, while having an enormous surplus of funds for care. This is what a US healthcare system will be like.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?