Taxis are Playing on Easy Mode. Taxi rides are easy to evaluate and hard to fake, mostly reliable and mostly fungible, if they mess up the costs are low. Providers don’t make predictions or put in bids, in fact they agree to do any task assigned to them and take the system’s price for it. There are no sacred values at stake, and while nasty regulations often raise prices, we’re talking about a different order of magnitude of regulatory issues and costs. It’s certainly a good sign that taxi markets can work, if they didn’t we could likely safely say that the medical/legal proposals were dead on arrival. But it doesn’t make me confident. And my experience at MetaMed says that people don’t want the thing you’re pitching here, even if they’re wrong to not want it.
In terms of the tax on skills I was referring to providers needing those skills, more than consumers. Consumers have the far easier job, although it is still too hard for most people, since most cases won’t see one thing dominate on all fronts.
You can pay a lot of money (high 4 figures or 5 figures) and then we give will research the best treatments for you and there’s no promise of effectiveness.
It’s my impression that people usually don’t want to pay for information directly. People are not willing to pay for a ConsumerReports report before buying a new washing mashine. On the other hand people are quite willing to read Amazon reviews about what’s the best washing machine and make their buying decision based on that information. They are also willing to go to the WireCutter and let them get their affiliate commission (even through most of the people likely don’t think about the commission).
I think the success of various expensive alternative medicine treatments suggests that people are quite willling to pay money for treatments that they hope will help them with a medical issues for which they currently don’t have a solution.
If a person starts answering a questionaire about their pain, it’s straightforward to be able to funnel them to the person who does the mirror hands for amputees.
In Germany the person who does mirror hands for amputees would need to spend ~1 year for an education as a “Heilpraktiker” to be allowed to heal people and then a bit of time to learn how the mirror handing works and how to estimate the probabilities.
It’s a quite different skillset then the expensive skillset of doctors.
As far as the skillset of making good predictions about treatment success goes, I think it will help in many cases with the clinical decision making. David Burns (who was one of the people who popularized CBT) wrote a bit about how important testing and calibration is in his essay of why he now advocates TEAM instead of CBT. Working with calibration does require additional skills that are a barrier but it pays off. Working that way while being supported by software will be easier then with photocopying sheets the way Burns does.
Taxis are Playing on Easy Mode. Taxi rides are easy to evaluate and hard to fake, mostly reliable and mostly fungible, if they mess up the costs are low. Providers don’t make predictions or put in bids, in fact they agree to do any task assigned to them and take the system’s price for it. There are no sacred values at stake, and while nasty regulations often raise prices, we’re talking about a different order of magnitude of regulatory issues and costs. It’s certainly a good sign that taxi markets can work, if they didn’t we could likely safely say that the medical/legal proposals were dead on arrival. But it doesn’t make me confident. And my experience at MetaMed says that people don’t want the thing you’re pitching here, even if they’re wrong to not want it.
In terms of the tax on skills I was referring to providers needing those skills, more than consumers. Consumers have the far easier job, although it is still too hard for most people, since most cases won’t see one thing dominate on all fronts.
When I understand the MetaMed pitch it’s:
You can pay a lot of money (high 4 figures or 5 figures) and then we give will research the best treatments for you and there’s no promise of effectiveness.
It’s my impression that people usually don’t want to pay for information directly. People are not willing to pay for a ConsumerReports report before buying a new washing mashine. On the other hand people are quite willing to read Amazon reviews about what’s the best washing machine and make their buying decision based on that information. They are also willing to go to the WireCutter and let them get their affiliate commission (even through most of the people likely don’t think about the commission).
I think the success of various expensive alternative medicine treatments suggests that people are quite willling to pay money for treatments that they hope will help them with a medical issues for which they currently don’t have a solution.
If a person starts answering a questionaire about their pain, it’s straightforward to be able to funnel them to the person who does the mirror hands for amputees.
In Germany the person who does mirror hands for amputees would need to spend ~1 year for an education as a “Heilpraktiker” to be allowed to heal people and then a bit of time to learn how the mirror handing works and how to estimate the probabilities.
It’s a quite different skillset then the expensive skillset of doctors.
As far as the skillset of making good predictions about treatment success goes, I think it will help in many cases with the clinical decision making. David Burns (who was one of the people who popularized CBT) wrote a bit about how important testing and calibration is in his essay of why he now advocates TEAM instead of CBT. Working with calibration does require additional skills that are a barrier but it pays off. Working that way while being supported by software will be easier then with photocopying sheets the way Burns does.