Comment by _9vpl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _9vpl | Hacker News Reader

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So, I’m one of Theranos’ biggest critic, since I’ve had a weird fascination with the company since someone on HN pointed out the bizarreness of its BoD back in 2013.

I think if Theranos hadn’t gone all-in on its fraud it still could have had an impact. One area was that it was actually pushing to change laws (I know it did this in Arizona) to give individual control over blood testing instead of requiring people to go through doctors and corporations. Another area was price transparency. Much like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma (https://surgerycenterok.com), it was listing all the prices for its tests right there on its website. These 2 things alone would be a major advancement in the US. Forget the mini blood tubes.

The law change for direct access to lab ordering and results is really independent of Theranos. HHS changes rules in 2014 to allow patient access [0] that goes back almost 20 years.

The price listing was pretty cool though.

[0] http://www.labtestingmatters.org/direct-access-to-test-resul...

It’s also not clear that it’s a good thing; false positives lead to serious negative consequences which is why tests aren’t ordered in the first place. It’s why you don’t get a colonoscopy at 25: chance_of_false_positive * harm_of_false_positive > chance_of_detection * treatment_success until much later in life. You as an individual are not qualified to make that aggregate decision.

I thought the individual having control (and choosing to use Theranos) was a bad thing, no?

When you're buying one blood test you won't be able to tell what it missed. If you're a medical practitioner, ordering hundreds of blood tests per month (or something) you can afford to duplicate the test when you change testing provider and realise that they aren't doing a very good job!

Except that most practitioners are bound to use a single lab and then run as many tests as they have to do cover regulations and insurance. Then to boot you have no idea what they'll cost until you get the bill later.

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