

YC Health Care - mattrepl

In the land of the free, what prohibits YC or similar organizations from providing health care?<p>Is it not cost-effective?  Legal issues?
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pg
There's no one to sell it to us. All the cos selling health insurance assume
their customers are companies buying it for their employees.

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noodle
cost and overhead entanglement for short-term incubation, i'd guess.

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mattrepl
But what if it wasn't short-term. What if YC alumni decided to band together
for health care?

A group of independent contractors is maybe simpler to think about than YC and
the companies it produces.

It may be that health care being tied to employment is the real problem. The
customer of the insurance companies are corporations, not people. That leaves
two options: become a corporation or create an alternative means to get health
care.

For the startup crowd, becoming a corporation is the obvious path. Founders
may go without health care during the early days, but the ones really out of
luck are independent contractors.

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noodle
well, as an individual, you can buy healthcare. for example,
ehealthinsurance.com. or you could join a group that helps negotiate cheaper
healthcare, like the freelancers union.

there are definitely options, you don't need to be in a large company to have
health insurance. its just standard for a company to help pay part or all of
your insurance costs. its a perk for working at a big company that you don't
get working freelance or at a small business.

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mattrepl
Individual rates can be ridiculous, organizations like the Freelancers Union
may fix that.

Beyond the difference in cost per individual, when health care is tied to an
employer it can be a deterrent from changing employers. For instance, an
employee undergoing cancer treatment would be forced to stay with the current
employer and insurance policy even if they received a better job offer.

There are some federal requirements for covering pre-existing conditions, but
they do allow for a period of time where no coverage for those conditions is
provided. Some states require immediate coverage of pre-existing conditions.

The original intent of this post wasn't to seek out risk-reduction in startups
but to spark a discussion on how health care in the U.S. could be improved.

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noodle
ah, well, you didn't word the post to line up with the intent :)

my personal healthcare improvement idea is this: make basic, universally
necessary healthcare/tests/procedures/etc standardized, efficient, cheap to
execute, and consequently free to all americans. this would create a standard,
cheap, accessible, low-grade universal healthcare. i'm modeling this idea off
of the army - their doctors are like robots with the commonplace procedures.
they're done quickly, efficiently, and researched and standardized so they're
cheap as hell to perform.

i'd like to think that this would make insurance substantially cheaper, since
you wouldn't be tapping it for the mundane doctors visits -- only for the
relative emergencies. the average healthy american wouldn't use their
insurance except for once in a few years, making the premiums drop.

other than that, have the system work the same way. it would require a
government investment, but so would any change to the system.

