The Conference

We kicked off our health care conference last night with a bang in SoDo (South Downtown) in Seattle, WA. We were pleased with the attendance, and if the opening night speakers were any indication, we'll have an awesome conference.

An attempt to summarize what was said would prove fruitless, so we'll just touch on a few of the points here. The primary problem our speakers have identified with the current system is that instead of being motivated by an altruistic ideal of universal health, current health care systems are motivated by profit. In fact, because of this, the very entities that claim to be providing our health care have as their primary motivation keeping costs down, not keeping us healthy. The second problem identified was that the system itself is opaque and its workings are not decipherable by the average consumer.

The solution proposed (and which will be discussed in great detail during the rest of the conference) is an Open Health Care system, designed loosely around the Open Source Software movement. We'll keep you updated on new proposals, but the loose framework involves empowering individuals to provide health care for each other, not for profit, but for the love of health care. By empowering individuals to provide health care we can avoid the problems associated with large insurance corporations only caring about their bottom lines, and we can create transparency that is unprecedented. Rather than trusting that Johns Hopkins or Cornell or the University of Weehawken has correctly evaluated a doctor we will be able to review his record online. The details are far from resolved, but we think this conference has already justified itself!