IMO, there's an interesting opportunity for AI to make healthcare deflationary.

For example, Medicare is launching a new program in July that pays a fixed rate for achieving defined outcomes, like lowering blood pressure or cholesterol. Medicare's explicit goal here is to create incentives to automate the repetitive parts of care delivery with software. (Much of preventive cardiology is surprisingly algorithmic and guideline-driven, so this is more plausible than it seems.)

This reverses the incentives of the current system, where CPT codes incentivize doing more "stuff" (but not necesarily delivering the most effective care efficiently).

If you're a software engineer who cares about health, and have been sitting on the sidelines till now, I think the next few years are a really interesting time to make a contribution.

> IMO, there's an interesting opportunity for AI to make healthcare deflationary.

How many times have I heard this, about how many techs. But this time for real?

Health spending in the us is too tied up with the country’s economy for it to ever be reduced. Same goes for housing. The cost of both of these will continue to increase. As long as the investor class is satisfied, this is all that matters.

> If you're a software engineer who cares about health, and have been sitting on the sidelines till now, I think the next few years are a really interesting time to make a contribution.

do you have thoughts on what that looks like? what does the hiring landscape look like?

It depends on who’s using it, and I’d say the doctors can use it more intelligently than the patients.

"AI will solve this deeply rooted social problem" is, and forgive my bluntness, is one of the most idiotic AI opinions I've seen this week.

The only thing that will fix American healthcare is absolute abolishment of private insurance. That's it. No amount of gentle incentive tweaking or whizbang technology is going to solve the fundamental problem of human greed and immorality.

Allowing private health insurance to exist is inhumane and can only result in profit extraction and exploitation of the most vulnerable members of society whose only options are literally to pay up or die.

That's the break. We've allowed profit-seeking individuals to stand in between citizens and literal life saving medicine. And you think the solution to that is to add more middlemen and profiteering exploitative corporations. Utter insanity.

The solution is to make it illegal for anyone to say "no, you may not have this life saving medication or proceedure". The solution is to remove profit from medicine. To allow profiteering and gatekeeping of people's very lives is immoral in the extreme. Giving more private corporations more influence is insanity. The solution is less private influence of medicine, not more.