'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?

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: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.