The contrarian's guide to sick care

In Zero to One, PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel contends that creating new things is both the best way for a company to profit and the only way for humans to progress. However, he is concerned that technological progress has stagnated today. Zero to One presents his solution to this problem: nurturing small startups developing revolutionary innovative technologies.

He challenges startup entrepreneurs to answer the contrarian question-What important truth do very few people agree with you on? The business version of the question is: What valuable company is nobody building?

Prediction season is here.

Here are some of my sick care contrarian truths:

1. Patients are not customers and are unwilling and unable to judge the quality of their care
2. Changing patient and doctor behavior is the holy grail of transforming sick care to healthcare
3. Disruptive physician entrepreneurs are more threatening than disruptive clinicians
4. For every technological action, there is a human high touch, low trust reaction
5. The free market is not an effective way to limit the costs and quality of sick care at scale
6. Medical educators and trainers will stop resisting transformation
7. A broken higher education and graduate level business model will make inequality worse
8. Generational stereotyping is not generalizable
9. Doctors are not lousy businesspeople
10. Academic medical centers are not entrepreneurial
11. The number of doctors who are employed will hit a ceiling
12. FAGMAcare will crash and burn billions of dollars before they do
13. Textbooks have no future
14. More students who have attended a community college will be accepted to medical schools.
15. The new medical triple threat is clinician-technologist-entrepreneur
16. The historically high numbers of medical school applicants will plateau
17. The MD/MBA bubble will pop
18. The sick care workforce pipeline will sprout even bigger leaks
19. Private practice will rebound
20. 1-2% of practicing clinicians will develop an entrepreneurial mindset
21. LinkedIn will hit a growth wall
22. Bioentrepreneurs won't take Therantology in graduate school
23. Finsicktech will mature and the path to progress will inflict collateral damage
24. Most doctors will not quit practicing medicine despite what they tell people
25. Patients, clinicians, and healthcare executives will continue to distrust AI because there is no Moore's Law in sick care.

And then there is the future of SnAIke oil.

Here's to the crazies.

“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” ― Yogi Berra

The best way to predict the future is to create it. – Peter Drucker

The future is now, just unevenly distributed- William Gibson

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack