“Why are so many people invested in keeping medical issues private? The answer is probably insurance. We should change it so they have to insure people. Maybe we have a safe place where people can go live in a world like that and see if it works.”
And just like that, in only four sentences, Larry Page made the best case ever for why nobody should ever put any information into a Google product…ever. Honestly, where do you start? The complete oblivion to the way health care works in this country? The utter ignorance of the knock-down drag-out year-long brawl in 2009 over how to get people insured? The indifference to the entire notion of privacy?
Larry has absolutely stupid money. Larry doesn’t have to worry a lick about where his health care is coming from for the rest of his life. “We should change it so they have to insure people” – guess what, genius, that’s called a “mandate,” and Barack Obama burned through every last atom of political capital he had to try to make it happen. Larry Page can pay straight cash for anything medical, pretty much forever. Meanwhile, the rest of us are at the mercy of whoever our employer is willing to contract with – in my case, Blue Shield of California, which appears to be run by feces-flinging monkeys unable to receive communication back from the providers whose records they request. I don’t really have an alternative either – I could go to Kaiser and take the chances one takes with an HMO, even though Blue Shield’s steadfast refusal to cover anything is practically an HMO in and of itself. Or I could pay cash, lose the discounts that come with negotiated group insurance, and go broke inside of a year.
So yeah. How about I just quit my job and go live in the safe place where they have to insure people? Because remember what I said about working from home a while back? I’ll just buy a ticket to fly to this place. And best of all, I’ll just tell everyone I’ve got major health issues requiring medication and possibly longer term care in my dotage, because guess what, that’s sure to make the people who have to insure me charge the least possible amount for the insurance. Hint: not all insurance is created equal. What you’re probably thinking of is universal CARE, not coverage, and it’s the thing that the GOP keeps waving as part of that hellish nightmare that is Britain. Or Canada.
There have been a couple of cutting articles in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker that sort of get at this, but I’ll sum it up quick: there are way too many people in this valley who live in their little bubble at the crossroads of Affluent and Asperger’s. People who never had to get up at 5 AM to unload a truck. People who never sat on a forklift. People who never worked for minimum wage at a temp gig, doing the same work that staff were getting twice the money for plus benefits. We’ve created a class of instant millionaires who think what they have is normal, and who don’t grasp – or care – why anyone else can’t just do the same.
What we have done in Silicon Valley is this: we have normalized the absence of empathy. It’s not a model to emulate.