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I'm incredibly excited to see what they come up with, but if it's just some tooling that further entrenches healthcare-via-employers then I'm going to be disappointed (for the reasons you point out about how crazy and stupid that system is).

These are all very smart people, so I have to assume that they have realized that insurance is a fundamentally flawed mechanism for providing the kind of health care we want, without a universal mandate - which, as private companies, they're not able to issue.

If they instead tackle health care via some other mechanism than insurance - say trying to drive down prices to make it more affordable via transparent pricing in a competitive marketplace (e.g., like the diagram in the article where doctors, pharmacies, etc, list their services) then that has a potential to be a huge, positive change.

That said, they're still operating in our regulatory framework, so they still do need to provide insurance to their employees. So I hope they're able to dual-band it - provide a high-deductible, low-premium HSA with contributions from the company, and let the employees shop on this marketplace from their HSA, while still being covered in the catastrophic case by the insurance plan.




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