“Ah yes, health insurers, well known for their willingness to pay for experimental and elective treatments” — wait, no, scratch that, reverse it!
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I see the impulse to go “ok, I can’t see how this helps those customers, it makes no sense, but they’re buying, so the company must be doing something right.” But there’s always another possibility: that it’s fraud.
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The natural comparison to uBiome is Theranos, because that’s another female-founded health-tech fraud. But the types of fraud are actually very different.
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Theranos’s tech would have been unquestionably valuable (to patients, drugstores, insurers, etc) had it worked. And something like it probably could have worked. It just didn’t. Elizabeth Holmes lied to everyone about the tech, and went to extreme lengths to avoid discovery.
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That means that, to avoid being fooled by a Theranos, you’d have to do a bunch of due diligence. Tracking down the extent of the deception was hard.
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uBiome was a different kind of fraud: long before you had any evidence of a specific scam, you should have been able to tell that *the product just isn’t useful enough to enough people* to justify the valuation unless something shady is going on.
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Perhaps the investors *did* know and were trying to find a greater fool? Or perhaps they just thought “she’s a great salesman, she’ll figure it out” and didn’t realize that one way to “figure it out” is to cheat?
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
You can make a lot of money selling useless products. People buy magnetic bracelets and power crystals, and I could give plenty of bigger but more controversial examples I consider comparable.
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Replying to @peroxycarbonate
Yes, and that’s shady in its own way, but at least you can point to evidence that people *like* the crystals! There is an actual community of crystal-lovers large enough to justify the sales numbers of the crystal-sellers!
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
How about unnecessary/harmful joint replacement surgeries? Actually, a better example would be unnecessary mammograms, and other such tests.
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insurers do eventually stop paying for those when the evidence is overwhelming. The medical system learns slowly.
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