Joe Flower Healthcare Futurist

Futurist’s Office Stolen by Pirate, Saved by Entrepreneur

jflower — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 20:21:52 +0000

Sausalito, CA. In the pre-dawn rain on January 22nd, a silent figure crept aboard a 107’ luxury converted tugboat for sale in a prime berth in downtown Sausalito, CA. He loosened the 10 heavy hawsers tying the boat to the dock and set the boat adrift, snapping electric and water lines. That’s when Joe Flower […]

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Healthcare Economics: Why this stuff doesn’t work the way you think it does — and how to fix it

joeflower — Sat, 18 Mar 2017 00:12:33 +0000

Healthcare economics are weird, opaque, and convoluted. The business of healthcare is unlike any other business. The politicians and pundits arguing about how to fix healthcare in the United States don’t understand what they are trying to fix. Neither do you, probably, because almost no one does. So let me help with this explainer, your best eight minutes on healthcare economics, why healthcare economics are different, and what would work.

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Trump Friend and Ally: Donald, Build Universal Healthcare

jflower — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 23:42:20 +0000

Opinions are flying. Opinionators with a plan to fix healthcare in America are suddenly as common as waiters with a script in Santa Monica. Few are worth a second glance. They fall into the “that’ll never pass” pile or the “that’ll never work” pile. So why should we pay any attention to Christopher Ruddy’s idea? […]

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Asking the Wrong Healthcare Questions. And Answering the Right Ones

jflower — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 21:53:04 +0000

I just published this Big Think post on Medium.com, because it’s time for more people, not just the choir, to understand what’s going on in healthcare. We’ve all got to stop asking the wrong questions about healthcare – who pays for it – and we’ve all got to start asking the right ones – what we pay for […]

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Not Normal Chaos

jflower — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 03:33:15 +0000

The short version of Vox’s Sarah Skiff on “Why Republican Disarray on Health Care Doesn’t Doom Repeal Efforts” would read something like: “It always looks this way in the throes of preparing major legislation. Remember how wild and confusing it was when the Democrats were trying to put together healthcare reform in 2009? Joe Lieberman was insisting on a public option, ‘pro-life’ Democrats […]

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Healthcare: Where’s the Bin Marked “Productivity”? Where’s the Lever Marked “More”?

joeflower — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 14:48:41 +0000

Healthcare costs too much, and we don’t get enough of the healthcare that we need. This is our core problem in one word: “productivity.” The obvious difficulties of healthcare in the U.S., where we can’t seem to take care of everyone, millions are saddled with coverage that is too expensive for them to really use, Medicaid […]

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MACRA: We Can’t Expect the Feds To Be The Key Lever of Change

jflower — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 18:55:36 +0000

The final MACRA rules are out. MACRA stands for the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), the historic Medicare reform law that passed last year that nobody outside of healthcare has even heard of, and everyone inside the industry is in a sweat about. There is plenty of room for debate about the rules, […]

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Blockchains: Turbo-charging Healthcare Transactions

joeflower — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 14:18:58 +0000

What It is: You’ve heard of bitcoin, that magical digital money not attached to any national economy or banking system? Blockchain is the technology behind it. It’s a clever extension of existing encryption techniques that enables trusted, secure transactions of any type, even with total strangers, even without knowing the identity of the counterparties — […]

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Neural Dust: the blind see, the lame walk?

joeflower — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 22:21:11 +0000

What it is: A tiny encapsulated bit of circuitry, with sensors and a chip, that can be inserted into your brain (or actually, anywhere in your body), to check out the local conditions and report back. Here’s the actual paper in Cell from the UC Berkeley scientists and here’s a bit about it on the […]

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Follow the money. Then follow the trust.

joeflower — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 23:12:57 +0000

How will healthcare be distributed in the future? In ways that bear only some resemblance to the way it is distributed today. The changes will be driven by the new economics of healthcare embedded in the “volume to value” movement, based as it is on “provider-sponsored risk,” the basic, obvious and yet startlingly opaque logic […]

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