Scott Adams' Blog

The Systems President

Posted March 29th, 2017 @ 8:39am in #healthcare #Trump

Was President Trump’s first attempt at getting a healthcare bill a failure?

Your answer to that question probably depends on whether you are a goals-thinker or a systems-thinker.

If you see the world in terms of goals, you would say the healthcare bill did not get enough votes on the first try, and therefore it is clearly a Trump/Ryan failure. 

But if you see the world in terms of systems, things look a lot better. I talk about the advantages of systems over goals in my book. The quick summary is that a system is something you do on a regular basis that improves your odds of success in a non-specific way. Systems-thinkers choose paths that allow them to come out ahead in the long run even if they appear to be “failing” along the way.

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A Direct-Democracy Healthcare Bill

Posted March 26th, 2017 @ 11:11am in #healthcare #Detroit #FDA

I don’t know much about Congress, and all its arcane rules, but I think the process for creating a healthcare bill goes something like this:

1. Congress asks lobbyists to write a bill that is good for the healthcare industry and bad for the American public.
2. The bill fails because Congress is neither credible nor functional. But the public doesn’t care too much about the failed bill because it wasn’t for their benefit anyway.
   
3. Repeat.

With our current system (a Republic), that’s as good as we can do in 2017. The politicians need money to stay in office, and this is how they earn it – by selling out their constituencies.

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Start-ups that Lower the Cost of Health Care

Posted March 15th, 2017 @ 9:05am in #obamacare #healthcare #whenhub #Watson

[Update: fixed bad email address in step 3.] 

Most of the remaining problems in the world are information problems in disguise. For example, our politicians in the United States are trying to figure out how to provide health insurance to low-income people without breaking the budget. 

It looks impossible, at least with our political system as it stands. 

So I thought I would help. 

In my opinion, the only hope for affordable health care in the long run comes from startups that will dramatically lower the cost of medical services. There are many such healthcare startups in the pipeline, and some could make a big difference to society. As a public service, I’ll collect a list of them in this blog post so investors can see their options for helping the country lower the cost of medical care. 

I started the list with one start-up (Sandstone) that I happen to know because I invested in it. Any healthcare startup that lowers the cost of medical treatment is welcome to add their information to the list. To add your company, do this…

1. Go to whenhub.com and create a schedule with one entry for your company, using as your event date the year you went live with a commercial product, or the year you plan to do so. 

2. You can include any kind of documents, links, photos, or video to your one event. But please include at least a paragraph saying how your startup lowers healthcare costs.  

3. Share your schedule, with its one event, to this address: healthcarestartups@whenhub.com. I’ll check it for completeness and add it to the list.

By the way, WhenHub – a start-up I co-founded – wasn’t designed for this sort of task, but I couldn’t think of an easier way to do it. I’ll use our new streaming feature to create one schedule (really just a list of start-ups) from the shared events. You’ll see the Whencast below grow as I add entries.

The nature of Whencasts is that you can share them on social media and embed them on blog pages. So if this list is useful, feel free to share it. Whencasts stay live and updated no matter where they travel.

I’m also imagining some sort of “digital doctor” healthcare insurance that is super-cheap and relies largely on startups that are not yet part of mainstream medicine. This low-cost insurance plan might be better (but slightly riskier) than traditional medical treatment. For example, if the low-cost insurance people get first access to IBM’s Watson for diagnosing problems, they are probably getting better treatment recommendations than the patients going to human doctors.

I can also imagine this low-cost health insurance plan asking patients to voluntarily give up more health-related privacy than normal, and perhaps agree to some sort of health tracking technology. The data from this group would help improve healthcare technology and treatment for all. 

We probably can’t tax-and-spend our way to universal healthcare. The numbers just don’t work. But startups could get us more options for serving low-income folks if we decide to make that a priority.

Update 2: Here’s a great article by Benjamin Joffe explaining the medical tech device revolution ahead of us. This is one of the most underreported stories on the planet. 

More Start-Ups That Could Lower Healthcare Costs

Posted December 12th, 2016 @ 9:51am in #skydeck #startup #ucberkeley #healthcare

I’ve been working with the UC Berkeley start-up ecosystem – the largest in the world – to help improve their odds of success. The stakes are high. Consider the healthcare field alone, and how much can be saved in terms of both lives and money. I included at the bottom of this post a snapshot of some start-ups coming out of that ecosystem. 

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What is Better Than a Republic?

Posted August 3rd, 2015 @ 11:05am in #ibm watson #healthcare #democracy #politics

Most of you would agree that our democratic system (a republic) is flawed in many ways, and yet it is still better than all the known alternatives.

So I thought I would come up with a better alternative.

Keep in mind that the Constitution of the United States was written before the Internet. I doubt the founders would have created the system we have today if they had better tools. So I will try to extend their thinking to modern times, when the Internet provides us with more options.

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