Back to episode — Episode 315 Scott Adams - Why Healthcare Costs Could Fall by 75%. With Whiteboard
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One of the big challenges for even trying to understand healthcare and trying to figure out why everything is so expensive and where it's all going to go is how you categorize things. I've been trying for literally years to figure out what categories to look at to figure out where the big expenses are. And whenever you see an article on this or somebody's got some statistics about healthcare costs…
← Previous segment →Let's look at the cost of a doctor. We've got these direct pay options now where you can say for $150 a month you can have all the doctoring you need by the same doctor who is a direct pay doctor. So there are a number of them already. They seem to be popular and they work well. And you know, it's the free market doing its thing. So that could be a huge improvement in the cost of just the doctor's time. There's also lots of telemedicine happening both for the VA and in other places. I'm going to tell you more about that because my app will also be hosting doctors. I'll tell you more about that later. But the idea is that lots of doctors are going online. I use Kaiser and I could already email my doctor and send pictures and all that stuff. So that should make a big difference. Of course you've got better online resources all the time. WebMD is actually pretty great and that information is improving over time. And then you've got the world of wearables, the little sensors that you can wear that will help you track what's wrong with you, catch things early, that sort of thing. Now if you look at the world of drugs, you've got regulations that can probably be fixed to improve the competitive landscape, you know, increase the buying power. And of course Amazon is starting to work on that area with JP Morgan Chase and the third company. So you're going to see a lot on meds. But I'm wondering if someday we'll be able to 3D print some of this stuff. Probably not anytime soon, but maybe someday. Then there's the supplies. Amazon might have something to do with that. You could have the supplies printed on demand. You could have them delivered to your home. And you'll probably see a lot more competition there. You could have, for some stuff that is not icky, there might be some ways to share it, etc. Transportation. I thought I saw an article where Lyft was going to be doing some, let's say, low danger hospital runs for people who aren't so bad that they needed an ambulance but they don't have a way to get to the hospital themselves. And you might see more value in the telemedicine because you don't have to travel anywhere if you're just doing it by phone. There's a real estate cost. Your doctor, your hospital, they need real estate and that costs a lot. But again the telemedicine takes that cost away. And a lot of your lab work you'll be able to put a blood sample or a urine sample in the mail and the real estate is centralized someplace cheap. So the lab, there's a number of startups that are working in the lab test space. So you should expect that this will get a lot easier. You'll do it at home. It'll be simple. It'll be cheaper. Then there's the world of equipment, stuff that tests things and CAT scans. And there's just a ton of stuff happening here with startups. So you're going to see lower scanning devices. You're going to see very small desktop devices for testing your blood. We already have a little device that you can put into your phone that will give you an actual FDA approved EKG. So that's amazing. So there'll be more sensors that work with your phone, more miniature equipment that you could just call up your Uber driver and say, can you drop off a piece of test equipment? I just bought at the drugstore the other day a thermometer that doesn't touch your body. Have you seen those yet? You hold it about an inch from your head and push the button and it can tell your temperature from an inch away. You just have to be in the room for half an hour so that your temperature and the room temperature have normalized. So you're seeing huge advances in the shrinking of both the cost and the size of that equipment.
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Insurance is kind of the tough one. But here are a few things I would say about that. One is that if you have telemedicine that's available all the time, it's going to be much easier to get a second opinion on anything. So if you make it dead simple to get a second opinion you should be able to make a type of insurance that covers that situation. In other words, if you're a doctor and you bought m…
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