Overseas medical care is pretty easy to obtain, and cheap by US standards. It is estimated that between 1,5 - 2 million people leave the US for medical care each year. About 80 000 enter the US for medical care. Also, about 2 million get prescriptions filled in Canada, and an uncertain number (maybe 600 000) get health care in Canada on forged papers.
The problem is, people who leave the US for medical care are people who can afford to take the time off and pay the cost, but are still uninsured, under-insured and unable or unwilling to pay the US costs. That is a limited slice of the population.
In addition, the issues people get treated abroad can be neither emergencies nor chronic conditions.
In other words, the US healthcare industry has a large captive market that foreign competition cannot touch.
There are already online pharmacies (I have used both the one by my insurance company and by walmart.com). Note that Amazon would have to have pharmacists in it’s online pharmacy and would be making the same types arrangements with insurance companies as its competitors do.
One innovation that perhaps a new company could do would be a massive chain of urgent care clinics. As you have noticed they have started to appear. These fill the gap between the 9-5/Monday thru Friday hours of primary doctors (and often a multi-day wait to get an appointment) and the tremendous expense of going to the emergency room.
I’d like to see a new player enter the luxury watch industry. The last new entrant there is Hublot, and it’s more interested in being edgy than it is at actually innovating anything.
I’d love to see an American counterpart to Rolex or Patek. I mean 100% American-made, in-house calibers, high quality, and a reputation for excellence. That should really shake up the game. Sure, there are some American watch brands. I mean manufactories - and using imported movements doesn’t count.
This is tough, because most of those I can think of such as A) Healthcare, B) Cell service, and C) Cable companies, all have massive regulatory capture and correspondingly huge barriers to entry.
There are some tiny slivers of legitimate infrastructure barriers to B and C, but most other countries handle that with legislation to treat the infrastructure like a utility and allow free and open competition on the existing infrastructure by all comers.
But of course, that can’t happen in the US, where the legislators are owned by the companies in A, B, and C.
Getting stuck in traffic is hated by everyone and has no real solution, but many good folks are working on self-driving cars that should help that.
Uber did a pretty good job disrupting the taxi industry in lots of cities, which was a similar situation of most people being unhappy but there being high regulatory barriers to entry. But that required some shady and reprehensible policies on their part, as well as pumping hundreds of millions to scale hugely while still in gray areas of legality that hadn’t been defined yet.
One really great candidate for this much-needed disruption, where many are unhappy and have no real choice: politics! But since political systems are the apotheosis and alpha and omega of regulatory capture, that’s a lamentably hazy pipe dream.
Oh, one I forgot - healthcare software. They all suck or are ridiculously expensive, and you have 2.5 choices: Cerner, Epic, or Mckesson. (okay, there’s a few more tiny ones nobody uses)
So there’s a limited selection that almost everybody hates either on features or price, but all the little players that have tried to innovate there have failed miserably in terms of widescale adoption.
I’m sure there’s lots of other niche examples like this that most of us just don’t know about, like PLC venders or industrial control software, or industrial equipment parts, and I’m hoping other dopers may eventually call some of those out.
What aspect of healthcare? Every operation seems to have its own specific platform- you have electronic health records, you have practice management systems, you have pharmacy systems and you have payment/accounting systems just to name the main ones I’m familiar with. And that’s a problem in its own right- system integration is a huge concern for a lot of healthcare operations.
The “unhappiness” in cell service is the products offered at the given prices. For the big 4 carriers (soon to be 3), a plan with a usable amount or fake “unlimited” data will cost you $80-$100 a month, no matter who you look at. More, there’s not really substantial discounts for going down to more capped plans.
That’s not the actual cost of service (particularly with the various hard and soft caps they put on the data service they provide), and there’s basically no innovation in the space that offers anything really different. If there were actual competition, you would see a broader variety of plans at a broader variety of price points.
On cable, I was specifically thinking of cable internet, because yeah, on the TV side there’s getting to be an embarrassment of riches.
But 50 million households in the US have only ONE ISP choice. 70% - 90% of households looking for 10mbps speed have only 1 or 2 choices (look in Figure 2 here).
Everyone hates Charter / Comcast / Cox, yet they are literally the only choice in most markets, and further, many states and municipalities have laws forbidding anyone else from offering any other choice to the people in those areas.
So sure, there’s some long tail stuff like Verizon Fios and Google Loon available to .01% of the population, but 70% - 90% have no real choice.
Yeah, good point - I was mostly thinking of EMR and clinical ssytems, but yes, generally they have to interact with a bunch of other systems, which will cost you more on a modular basis and increases friction and contributing to the awfulness of most of them.
But yet, part of their awfulness is the difficulty of integration, and the lock-in driven by that lock-in that makes you need to pony up for their poorly-coded additional modules to get full functionality.
Voting software. This is a huge market of thousands of US jurisdictions that are pretty much locked in to two or three vendors. There is research being done here in San Francisco (and other place) on sponsoring and developing open source voting software that would then be free to all US and foreign jurisdictions that want it. There are problems, including inertia, and getting a large enough tech population interested enough in it to test and monitor it for security, but it could be a huge breakthrough. Imagine, for example, if people could vote securely from their smart phones.
Re: luxury watches, that’s pretty much a niche market and any revolution there would go pretty much unnoticed by the rest of us.
I don’t think the OP is meaningful in its current form. All industries are vulnerable to a competitor with an innovative and effective product suddenly appearing, grabbing huge market share, and forcing others to adapt.
Is this what the OP is trying to get at: Which industries that right now appear mature, are likely to be shaken up soon, given the current direction of technological improvement?
I think that would be a clearer question.
Oh, god. As xkcd has poignantly pointed out, voting software, of ANY flavor, is a terrible idea.
Voting systems should be people voting on paper with controlled and auditable custody trails that leaves a permanent and re-countable record, that can be counted by machines AND people.
Anything else is madness, and just asking for vote hacking and nullification and other awful outcomes. No voting software + computing platform is ever going to be secure enough to be worth it, if we actually care about our voted outcomes.
And yes, I know the majority of our voting goes on on PROVEN unsecure machines running software with PROVEN vulnerabilities, that apparently nobody cares about. And it’s horrifying and sickening, but I really think more / better software is not the answer if we ever want voting integrity in our voting systems.
I guess my question is what industries are capable of providing much better goods and services either with existing technology or with minor investments, but right now are not incentivized because there is no competitive pressure to do so.
This is happening. Check out “door.com” as a prime example - flat fees for selling a house. After it’s appearance, I’ve been hearing ads on the radio for realtors who charge flat fees as well.
