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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.
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.
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.
Nope, she gave people fake healthcare information leading to misinformed self-care while promoting self-care based on that bad data. She's probably responsible for more deaths than anyone could even accurately account for along with everyone else at that sham of a company.
If they were being hounded and had something that worked, they could have shared raw data and invited auditors in for documentation. Instead it was all lies and secrets. Nobody fled because they were always two weeks from the breakthrough. Sometimes no amount of money can buy a breakthrough, no matter how much money you have, and how much you want it.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
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
Banning her from black turtlenecks and caked on makeup.
Thats right. Weekends are also terrible socialist ideas
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.