[notatoad]

My point wasn't just about cost, but rather care. People need doctors, and "there isn't enough doctors" seems to be a common problem in health care. The cost could also be mitigated by simply charging more, but having doctors spend their time driving instead of treating patients means that the number of doctors needed for the same quality of care goes way up, and in many cases doctors are not a resource that you can simply get more of because you need more.

For every doctor's appointment serviced by Heal, ~3 appointments are taken away from a community clinic somewhere.

[foobarbazetc]

You’re actually right about this. My primary care doctor tried one of these “visit people instead” services and absolutely hated it. Her days are usually 100% full at her office but driving around SF all day cut her throughput down to something like 30%.

Maybe the economics work somehow for others, but they didn’t for her (car + gas + parking + large drop in number of patients seen).

[trevyn]

>For every doctor's appointment serviced by Heal, ~3 appointments are taken away from a community clinic somewhere.

It sounds to me like you may be making unjustified assumptions to get to that conclusion. Citation?

[notatoad]

I outlined my reasoning in my post above, unless heal is creating new doctors they are hiring away doctors from more efficient types of care.

[trevyn]

Your reasoning is based on assumptions that there is no evidence for. Not all doctors are employed in providing care, you don’t know what Heal doctors are doing between seeing patients, you don’t know how Heal sources or compensates doctors, medical efficiency is not measured in patient-minutes, you don’t know how many patients a Heal doctor sees vs a clinic doctor, you don’t know the bottlenecks of community clinics, etc. etc.

[alsetmusic]

> Your reasoning is based on assumptions that there is no evidence for.

I have no horse in this race, but I found it interesting that the above was followed by four “you don’t know…” statements.

You’re making assumptions as well. The person to whom you are responding may know a great deal more than they have revealed.

[trevyn]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

[xapata]

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)