Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano and Ethereum’s early co -founder, says that the American Healthcare System is not broken – it works exactly as designed. And that is, he says, the problem.
“Health care is just fucked in America. It’s just fucked. Everyone knows it’s true,” Hoskinson said in an interview with Coindesk TV at the rare Evo conference in Las Vegas. “However, they all try to continue to pass the system because it is simply too profitable.”
Although it may seem a severe criticism, Hoskinson puts his money where his mouth is: he paid an investment of $ 200 million in a medical center in Gillette, Wyoming, which now serves about a third of the city’s population.
His vision of his several million dollars investment? “If they can’t pay, don’t bill them,” he said.
The “horrible” problem
So, what are the main problems with the current health system that made him pay millions into a new type of system? According to Hoskinson, this is how doctors are paid.
“All financial incentives are simply horrible and wrong in health care,” he told Coindesk TV, using an example of how doctors are encouraged to treat their patients anyway, regardless of their needs.
“Let’s say that you are 75 years old and that you have a ton of cool morbidities and that you simply do not feel good … Your doctor will be paid exactly the same amount of money to see you … because he or she will be paid to go to see a 16 year old girl coming for a urinary tract infection and just needed like five minutes and a few antibiotics.”
This economic structure, he said, discourages coordination, conversation and long-term planning. “They have all the incentives to keep you as sick as possible as long as possible, because they have developed chronic treatments for all these things,” said Hoskinson.
And what is the source that built its scathing claims on the health system? “Because my father is a doctor, my brother is a doctor. Grandfather was a doctor, the uncle is a doctor,” said Hoskinson
The patient -centered solution
To solve this problem, Hoskinson suggests building an installation centered on the patient, and not billing codes or bureaucracies and using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain.
“Let’s build a clinic where we put the patient at the center. We build care teams, we use AI and we do everything in our power to try to make care centered on the patient who are affordable.”
AI, for this new system, will be used to support – and not replace – doctors. “Each day, it can be used in all of all medical knowledge, and you can have agents representing each specialty of medicine … and give a care plan updated at the start of the day to the supplier.”
The system, he said, can catch “subtle clues in the patient’s history” and help audit in real time. He also described AI tool plans which can report drug-medication interactions, transcribe visits to patients and possibly act as an “AI companion” to help people interpret food labels, medications and supplements.
The architecture of the project can also involve the blockchain.
Hoskinson has referred to selective disclosure and zero knowledge technology – cryptographic tools that can verify the facts (like age or citizenship) Without exposing underlying personal details. “You can satisfy the intention and philosophy of these buckets without revealing the underlying customer,” he said.
It also plans to open the source of the entire model – including protocols and software – to allow replication elsewhere. “We are not here to earn money [it]”Said Hoskinson.” The objective is to open source, open source the software, you know, to offer this healthcare system. “
He also put pressure for wider political reset. “Health insurance should be in the same way as you buy it in case you really become sick,” said Hoskinson. “It makes no sense to say, well, that’s where you get a cutting of paper or there when you want to get birth control or something.”
However, Hoskinson claims that this new health care model is faced with a decline in the traditional medical system.
“The hospital is trying to kill us,” he said.
“They do everything in their power to make our lives miserable. Uh, they cannot get our doctors. So it takes six months to 12 months to obtain identification information to make them practice medicine. I bring a global renowned surgeon and a famous transplantation surgeon. They will not give them skills of competence,” said Hoskinson.
Although Hoskinson’s fight to reorganize the health system could be a David scenario against Goliath, he sees him as part of his inheritance and his family. “I put $ 200 million in my own money in my clinic and we have been building for three years, and I legitimately want to solve this problem,” he said.
“I think it is my heritage and it is the heritage of the family and it is also the most important thing in America.”
