Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 10, 2026
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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…

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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 malpractice insurance, should you be held responsible if your patient got another opinion? Because if there were two opinions, maybe your insurance should say that doesn't seem like your fault because you got a second opinion. Or the customer does. So that might help. It might also help because big data is getting smarter and smarter. So more people are sharing their health information and we'll get smarter and smarter about drug interactions. We'll know more and more about nutrition and how that impacts everything that you're doing. So the more we learn big data-wise the lower the risk should be of doing something accidentally wrong. And the more easily you can get a second opinion just by picking up your smartphone and talking to a doctor in literally a minute, you should be able to take off some risk. You also should be able to take off some risk by robot surgery. Maybe not in the short run, but eventually we might get to the point where the robots are just so much better, even if they're assisted by humans, that you just don't have as many accidents. The other thing you could do is by keeping people out of your building you don't have as many people getting, you know, sharing germs. One of the biggest causes of death in this country is hospital mistakes. I mean think about it. That's one of the leading causes of death, is hospital mistakes. So the fewer people who physically go to a hospital because they can do things remotely, the fewer opportunities there are to share germs and get something wrong. The more second opinions you can get at a reasonable price, the more likely you can catch a bad decision early. The more you're doing big data, the more you've got sensors on your body, the more you can check things on your own like your own heart, the more likely you're going to avoid a big problem or at least have a second check against what your doctor is telling you.

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And then in nurses, I think you're going to see something like the gig economy where the nurses are coming to your house. It's more like an Uber situation. If you need a nurse there's one there in 15 minutes and you can watch them approach on your phone. I think you're going to see a lot of medicine go to YouTube so that when people need to do simple things, such as here's an example, let's say yo…

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