'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

Renewal App

[Anonymous Coward]

How about an app that signals when it's time for your renewal and gives you bus directions to the closest carousel?

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.

Re:not touching it with a 10ft pole

[Just Some Guy]

My company got a lot of help from Medicare when we wanted to analyze their data. There was about as much paperwork as you'd expect from a giant government entity, but everyone was nice and helpful. We were always made to feel welcome and Medicare publicly said they were glad to have us.

Your portrayal of government healthcare, at least under a Democrat president, is far from the reality I actually witnessed.

Oh, and I'm not a Democrat.

Too late, bitches...

[Penguinisto]

Oracle has already been practicing, and is perfectly poised to swallow gigatons of money while providing crap software to the medical insurance industry.

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:Low income people who qualify for medicaid

[ShanghaiBill]

Arizona laws are based on the presumption that if you make the poor miserable enough, they will move somewhere else.

Re:Low income people who qualify for medicaid

[Gavagai80]

Unfortunately they've overlooked the fact that the poor (except maybe the homeless) can't afford to move, it's the wealthy who are mobile.

Perhaps it's just that the summer weather makes Arizonans so miserable that they want to hurt people.

Re:Low income people who qualify for medicaid

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately they've overlooked the fact that the poor (except maybe the homeless) can't afford to move, it's the wealthy who are mobile.

This is a true point. It would actually make sense to fund bus tickets out of the area in a cynical way. Essentially saying we won't pay for the poor to stay but we will help them leave.

This sounds like a good idea, trains may be cheaper though. I think if we can identify all the poor, maybe with a little badge or something, then we can round them up once there's enough to fill the first train.

Re:Low income people who qualify for medicaid

[tlambert]

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.

What was being rejected was not the subsidy.

What was being rejected was the 4 year sunset on the subsidy, where the state had to take over the burden, at 25% a year, until it was shouldering 100% of it, and the fed was no longer giving the state any money whatsoever.

One year down the road, and it would have been about break-even, but two years down the road, it would have been a sucking chest wound in Arizona's economy, and in four years, it would have transitioned into a giant cancer.

The problem is that there are more poor people available to spend money, than there is persistent federal money. If the federal money had been permanent, the story would have been different.

We are currently seeing the sunset in the skyrocketing insurance premiums in California -- California drank the Kool Aid, and are now getting indigestion from it.

Arizona was a bit cheesed off, at the same time, because the fed would not enforce against illegal immigration across Arizona borders, yet at the same time, wouldn't let Arizona step up and do the enforcement that the federal government wouldn't.

This added (and continues to add) burdening of health care in Arizona, which was one of the major reasons Arizona was not really interested in participating.

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.

Re:Unicorns

[GrumpySteen]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)

cart before horse

[slew]

The whole idea that Silicon Valley VCs are somehow *looking* for unicorn companies or unicorn ideas is totally ass-backward.

Silicon Valley VCs believe they can *create* unicorns by throwing money at them. They aren't looking for them per-se. They are looking for the "right team", the "right investment", etc... The actual idea? Maybe a company can pivot to an idea before the iron grows cold and they are off to the next team. Or not.

A billion dollar valuation (aka unicorn) simply means VCs have managed to get some 3rd or 4th round chumps to dump a bunch of money into a company for a microscopic share of equity. The smart investors either came in early, or have financing structures with warrants that are dilutive (meaning they didn't actually invest at unicorn levels) unlike the employees that usually promised fully diluted shares some day. The whole fiction of unicorns is simply a media creation and has nothing to do with the market potential of a company. Like Enron or Adelphia accounting, it's a fiction that only has to do with the esoteric machinations of valuation and financing a startup.

I suspect the main reason nobody is pivoting towards medicaid recipients is that silicon valley companies probably don't think they can compete with the fraud levels that are out there. If some SV company thought they figured out a way to skim medicaid dollars, they probably can't hold a candle to what people are already doing to the system. It's hard to beat scammers at their own game (esp if you are trying to play fair). On the other hand, maybe a Uber-like company might want to tackle this, but I don't know if that would be a good thing.

Fine

[rsilvergun]

then take it away from the old people. They use _way_ more health care and didn't pay nearly enough in Medicare taxes to cover what they use. Screw everybody or screw nobody. Arizona's flush will billionaires who retired here (you'd be surprised how many). We wanted our cake and to eat it too. We wanted free money for the old people that vote and to abandon the working poor who can't make it to the polls.

You're problem isn't you drank the Kool-Aid, you're problem is you don't have the political will or guts to take care of your poor. Neither do we. You do a much better job.

And the Feds enforced like mother fucking crazy. We don't want them to enforce. We hire those people to be maids, cooks, and farm hands. We bitch and moan about it all day long but in the end we turn a blind eye. Obama deported them like crazy. It's one of the things the left hit him on (that and the drone strikes).