Apple has seen some high-profile departures in recent months from its health team after a series of leadership changes and internal disagreements about direction.
Tension has been increasing within the team in recent months, according to eight people familiar with the situation, although that undercurrent started several years ago. Some employees have become disillusioned with the group’s culture, where some have thrived while others feel sidelined and unable to move their ideas forward, the people said.
Four of the eight people said some employees hoped to tackle bigger challenges in the health-care system, such as medical devices, telemedicine and health payments. Instead the focus has been on features geared to a broad population of healthy users… Wellness involves helping those who are generally healthy with areas including exercise, meditation and sleep, while medical applications target patients with specific diseases. Wellness is less risky and less regulated than diagnosing and treating disease, but it’s not where most of the cost is in the health-care system. Almost 90% of U.S. health-care expenditures are for people with chronic diseases, according to the CDC.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s what we’d like Apple to tackle when it comes to health:
Obviously the health insurance system in the United States of America is FUBAR and an unspeakably massive drag on the economy overall.
The basic problem is that the prices of healthcare are not defined. They are elastic. What else do you buy without seeing the price upfront? Without knowing the hourly rate upfront? Or the cost of typical procedures? You go to a garage and it says on a board the labor cost per hour. It shows the cost of an oil change, brake services, a tune-up, etc. You go into Target and the price is on the product. You can compare that price with Amazon’s and Walfart’s and then decide where to buy. Not so with medical services, tests, and procedures.
Ever wonder why a new doctor asks what your insurance plan is upfront? It’s not just to determine that you have insurance, it also determines how much you’ll pay. The prices change based on the insurance company/plan. Ever wonder why, when you have “good insurance,” the doctor’s office seems excited to hear it? Or how well you’re treated over others with lesser (read: less profitable) insurance companies/plans? They want to keep you happy. You’re a high-value patient. If you’ve ever gone from crappy insurance to good insurance or vice versa, you know what we mean.
Until the medical costs are displayed upfront and everybody is charged that rate, regardless of their plan, this mess will continue. You can’t have real competition that drives down costs until the actual costs are clearly known by all parties and uniform per person regardless of their insurance or even lack thereof. — MacDailyNews, March 7, 2017
As they’ve done with Apple Card in terms of transparency and easy to see cost on interest, etc., Apple could do with healthcare. Again, you can’t have real competition that drives down costs until the actual costs are clearly known by all parties and uniform per person regardless of their insurance or even lack thereof.