Google is in the process of launching a health insurance subsidiary, Coefficient, in partnership with a Swiss insurance company. To those who’ve been waiting for Big Tech to come to the rescue of our healthcare system, it may sound promising. But you and I likely won’t benefit from it anytime soon. Coefficient will serve employers, not employees — because the former are spending the latter’s healthcare dollars.
Tech companies have transformed the way we shop, travel, date, work, and even think. If the lockdowns were tough, imagine just how much worse they would have been without technology — they would have been practically impossible. At no other point in history has anyone been able to barricade themselves in their home without being dependent on the goodwill of caring friends and family members for their sustenance.
But from a consumer’s perspective, healthcare remains largely untouched by technology. That isn’t to say that tech isn’t leading to breakthroughs in medicine. Nowadays, robots can perform surgery, and we’re even able to administer medical drugs into the brain via soundwaves. Healthcare technology has come a very long way. But we’re still far from integrating healthcare technology in our day-to-day lives.
The closest we’ve come to this is wearables: smartwatches, fitness trackers, and the like. About a quarter of the adult population sports them today. The devices allow users to monitor their vitals and exercise patterns, and some can even measure the wearer’s blood pressure. Wearables are nice to have, and they can lead to behavioral changes that have a positive effect on health, but one would be hard-pressed to equate their widespread adoption to a healthcare revolution.
Now, if the data they generate were to be used toward better healthcare decisions, we might see more meaningful change. Most promisingly, they could serve to make early diagnostics, alerting wearers of broad health trends and monitoring them for early signs of sickness. For example, if thousands of users experiencing a similar heartbeat pattern wound up in the hospital within 24 hours, devices could alert their owners upon detecting that pattern.
It’s about time those pricey devices also help us save money. If I pay my credit cards on time every month, I get a higher credit score, which grants me access to a lower APR, a nicer home, and better credit cards. In addition to the peace of mind and stability it affords, financial health comes with countless other benefits. Keeping one’s body healthy should be similarly rewarded: By tracking and maintaining my health via wearable technology, I should get a better deal on health insurance and ultimately minimize my lifetime healthcare spending.
Coefficient will allow employers to predict employees’ healthcare service consumption and pick better health insurance deals. Since Google owns Fitbit, Coefficient is technically in a great position to do just that, rewarding individual employees for healthy habits and revolutionizing the way we buy and receive care. Instead, Google’s going to use mobile tech to help employers calculate employees’ health risk more accurately and save money. At this time, Coefficient is setting out to be nothing more than another vendor for businesses that offer healthcare coverage. Any savings will go straight back to the employer, unless companies choose to share the savings with employees. In short, Coefficient likely won’t realize its full potential.
We can’t blame Google for shunning the masses. In today’s healthcare system, only 11% of healthcare spending comes out of patients’ pockets. The real customers making healthcare purchases in our country are private and public insurance companies. These are the prime customers for tech giants.
In the best-case scenario, Coefficient will save employers buckets of money, and we’ll see national healthcare spending drop, trickle-down style, for the benefit of many. But this is a brand new field for Google, whose healthcare shop Verily has been in turmoil lately. What’s more, Amazon got into healthcare two years ago when it partnered with Berkshire-Hathaway and JPMorgan to create Haven, a promising venture that sought to “transform health care to create better outcomes and overall experience, as well as lower costs for you and your family.” None of the success stories are in yet. Its two biggest headlines were when it launched and when its all-star CEO quit.
Realistically, Coefficient’s services will probably come in handy for a few large companies, as has been the case for most other innovations in employer-based health insurance models. That will continue to be true so long as patients aren’t in charge of their healthcare dollars. If we believe that tech companies could revolutionize the sector that accounts for over a sixth of the economy, we need to make innovation count for everyday people: We should remove middlemen and allow patients to pick the payment methods and care options that meet their needs.
Elise Amez-Droz (@eliseamezdroz) is a healthcare policy manager in the Washington, D.C., metro area and a Young Voices associate contributor.
