Every family is paying about $30k annually for healthcare they barely use, and that typically comes with a high deductible and out of pocket costs.
The median healthcare spend is $500 annually.
Now imagine an alternate version. Every American has a tax exempt HSA, but to participate, you must purchase at least a catastrophic insurance plan. If we allowed pre-ACA plans, we are looking at $6000-12000 per year. For the poor, instead of Medicaid or an ACA subsidy, the government just funds their HSA for them.
Now every family is putting $15k a year into an HSA. Most people would barely touch that. Maybe use some to pay for a DPC and the occasional lab or prescription. But by retirement, everyone would have $2-5 million saved up. That could pay for all lifetime medical expenses for 95% of Americans.
The only people who have to deal with insurance companies are those with catastrophic high cost events (trauma, cancer, etc). The only role government has is as a reinsurance to keep premiums low and help people with pre existing conditions get plans. Or for the truly destitute who burn through their HSA and cannot care for themselves (universal backstop coverage).
This would provide truly universal coverage, give money back to patients, simplify healthcare, and make every American richer.
sadly for SF this might be true.
I just recommended to a founder that “15k for a 2br seems within normal these days”. He’s funded by YC so he can live with it but not a good sign for the ecosystem
All through YC's history, investors (for obvious reasons) have tried to tell founders that YC wasn't worth it. In 2010 they just said we sucked. Now, since it's obvious we didn't, they've had to change the claim: now it's YC *used* to be great, but has declined from what it was.
Starcloud just became the fastest YC company ever to a $1B valuation after Demo Day. 17 months. Building data centers in orbit.
The hardest possible problem, the fastest possible ascent. This is what we should be building.
Fun fact: 80% of the F500 is HQ'd outside the Bay Area & NYC
Your biggest customer is doing $5B out of Texas and still runs on paper and email
The transformation has barely started. Get on a plane.
Tl:dr version: giving MDs financial bonuses for controlling their patients’ blood pressure paradoxically worsened blood pressure treatment because incentivized doctors were more likely to re-measure elevated BP until “normal” (rather than treat), resulting in many more strokes.
Yes, I can imagine a bipartisan deal to keep Social Security benefits for retired millionaires.
If there’s one thing most Democrats and Republicans still agree on, it’s Total Boomer Luxury Communism.
Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa
WEMBY JUST DROPPED A BAR:
"The lack of experience is a strength of us...because we could do impossible stuff because we don't know it's impossible" 🥶
(h/t @ohnohedidnt24)
In 2019, there were about 150,000 people working in autism therapy.
Six years later, there were 654,000—more than the number of people who work in mining and logging, or telecommunications, or at the US Postal Service.
This is an astoundingly rapid change in something so basic. In 15 years the proportion of people who say college is very important has decreased by more than half.
I've never met @SeanFennessey but have been following him long enough to know how much this moment means to him. I love @ringer because people like him put in the work; they geek out. So it's cool to see this moment.
"Yea, so Darax absolutely cooked Pancreatic cancer" - The presenter
jokes aside, THIS IS WHY WE DO THE THING.
Every incremental piece of progress leading to a generational treatment. RAS(on), PD1s, GLP1s, TNFa, VEGF. These are drugs adding months, years to people's lives, spurring more innovation (yes and more me toos for VC money).
But getting something which meaningfully signals a new treatment paradigm. Not marginally effective parsing the data. No nitpicking. This is it.