'Silicon Valley Is Missing Unicorns Because It Doesn't Understand Poor People' (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Silicon Valley might be hunting unicorns in the wrong places. According to one top federal health official, entrepreneurs and investors are overlooking one massive population: Low-income Americans who qualify for Medicaid. That's a big mistake, given that new funds are available for those that are bringing IT innovation to the space, said Medicaid chief medical officer Andrey Ostrovsky. "My gut is that it's a big opportunity with $500 billion in federal spend every year in a system that hasn't evolved technologically much since 1965," Ostrovsky said. "There are unicorns sitting in there," he added.

Comments

not touching it with a 10ft pole

[ooloorie]

"My gut is that it's a big opportunity with $500 billion in federal spend every year in a system that hasn't evolved technologically much since 1965,"

If you get in there as an entrepreneur, you'll be suffocating under a mounting of paperwork before being demonized by Democrats for trying to make a profit. And before you can build a real business, you can bet that Congress is going to pull out the rug from under your business model anyway by reforming government health care yet again. Sorry, but "here's a bucket of government money, go build something" is just not an attractive proposition even under the best of conditions, let alone when it involves poor people and a politically controversial area of public policy..

The best you can hope for at this point is that, as physicians exit the market, the big corporations that take over their functions will be able to invest some money in technology and innovation.

Low income people who qualify for medicaid

[rsilvergun]

won't for much longer. There's $880 billion in cuts coming to offset the tax cuts being proposed. I'm in Arizona and we have a law on the books that automatically rejects anyone for our low income health care program (AHCSS) if they're single. The law was preempted when Obama threatened to withhold Medicare funds from the old folks unless we also covered the poor. The stupid thing being that the money coming from the Feds to pay for low income people's health care brought more dollars to the state than we were spending. But around here we don't like paying for poor people to have, well, anything really.

Anyway, when those tax cuts hit and the funds stop the law kicks back in and anyone single gets kicked off their health care. Period. I got a buddy with type-I diabetes who didn't have his insulin until Obama made Arizona pay for it. We're gonna go back to struggling to get his insulin now.

In most of America the only money to be made in poor people is exploiting them because that's all we're allowed to do.

Re:After the Biotech scare...

[Austerity Empowers]

You don't target poor people, you target the providers who are getting that $500B and want to profit more from it. If there's one thing we can rely on in the health care industry (and the US in general) it is greed.