It was only a matter of time and I said (half) jokingly at the time that Uber is breaking the dam for everyone else to follow. Any regulated system will have its day in front of "disruptions" where the disruption is simply ignoring the regulation with some flimsy excuse, supported only by the money and lack of morals of VCs and startup combinators.
Uber took an axe to taxi drivers which weren't a popular group to begin with so that was easy. With the "disruption" perfected, next up are doctors, nurses, lawyers, electricians, cooks, engineers, the sky is the limit.
TBF it’s also an engine to push for regulations review. Awful lot of regulations are written for an age that no longer exists and just as many are to make management easier therefore startups pushing the boundaries actually a correcting mechanism.
It has been my observation that the companies all had plans to "disrupt"...but it seems they never had a solid "profitable" plan past when the VC money ran out.
Aside from turning employees into contractors...most of which have not done the math on how much they are losing through having to use your own car with no employee benefits. Doordash/Uber start looking a lot less attractive if you figure in the $.65/mile costs (fuel, repairs, insurance, car purchase price) that you would be paid by most govt or "real" companies.
Almost everyone I know who does Doordash makes about $20/hr (which isn't good anyways) and they are not figuring in the costs of the vehicle.
To what degree is this just another symptom of the US healthcare system being flawed and in need of rework? To what degree would anyone use such a service if the costs remained high?
I used Zocdoc in the past to find a doctor and ended up with a doctor who just charged out-of-pocket instead of insurance, and it worked great. Would an app that shows up-front pricing be better for the consumer?
Among the things that need to give are 1) insurance companies making no money because there's no margin left in the system for them, and 2) several times as many doctors, which means breaking the protection racket that intentionally limits the supply.
Most hospitals (both for-profit and non-profit) are terribly inefficient. They burn up clinician time on administrative tasks that could be automated or performed by cheaper office staff or not done at all. And employees often waste a lot of time just waiting around because no one has optimized workflows to shorten queues or eliminate bottlenecks. The incentives are structured in a such a way that there's often little reason to improve.
It’s a complex problem because a lot of those hospitals are non profit, so they have zero incentives to have high margins because no shareholders to return money to. Higher salaries for executives though…
It’s important to note that in most countries the law even states that they need to pay competitive salaries for these positions, so they can’t even pay them much lower amounts than their non profit counterparts
The exact profit margins of hospitals as a whole doesn't matter. Hospitals are where health care happens but financially, they are simply a platform for a multitude of other private entities which make profits on top of the simple hospital fees - the "Uber For Nurses" thing is just one of many ways this happens, you have everything from data management companies to separately own MRI machines adding to the patient's bill and having a voice in the management of the hospital.
Traveling nurses make more than lots of doctors though, so I dont think they're being taken advantage of. However, Im sure this company is trying to take a piece of that traveling nurse pie.
Yeah, maybe it's the idea that hospitals should make profit that should give?
Like, sorry, but not being from the US the whole idea of a "margin" when running a hospital is insane. Hospitals are paid from our ample taxes and the patient pays nothing - there is no room for profit there, not should there be one.
How much does your country’s medical professionals make, how long do patients wait for care and what is the level of care as measured by variety and efficacy? Seems hard to compare without normalizing these things.
Could I use this app to hire a nurse and get a diagnosis from home? If we can start getting even meagre medical treatment to skip insurance / other middle men, I could see this having a great impact on healthcare prices, especially since AI is such a good information extractor, which is 90% of the role doctors play anyway.
Generally speaking nurses in the united states cannot provide a diagnosis, at least without jeopardizing their license. You can already find a doctor using a service like Zocdoc who may cut out middlemen, though regulatory capture has made it close to impossible to meaningfully reduce costs in this way. I would not recommend using AI to diagnose or treat yourself (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/well/ai-chatgpt-medicatio..., for instance) without the help of somebody highly trained to interpret this information and make good decisions.
Nurses don't really do diagnosis, but follow the ones doctors give.
(Except for trivial things)
Otherwise I unfortunately know plenty of doctors that could easily be replaced by an LLM, but for now I prefer a diagnosis from a real doctor (who may use AI as a tool).
While I do understand the importance of training, degrees and experience I see that people in the medical field beyond Doctors seem to have a very holier than thou attitude probably because they have 10 edge cases of how MRI can go wrong drilled into them (MRI technicians), not everyone is comfortable with needles and human body (nurses) and because it seems that only Pharmacists can sort and provide us the right medicines when in fact it can be easily done by some robots.
In before someone says that your reasoning is flawed because that is very incorrect perception of the field. All I see is that regulatory capture has worked very well here and is simply stopping totally novel and practical ideas which work on tradeoffs from even taking off
> A companion Roosevelt Institute brief found that some platforms "use data-brokers to determine nurse debt levels and offer lower wages to those with highest debt loads."
Everyone wants healthcare expenses to go down but the biggest healthcare expense is the salaries of providers. So, hard to give the masses what they want without making a smaller group of people who benefit from the status quo angry.
to be a bit pedantic, that says they account for only 15% of the excess healthcare spending, relative to other countries. It's not surprising given doctors in the united states have a higher level of training compared with many peer countries, and _all_ salaries are much higher in the united states compared with almost any country.
The 15% extra administrative cost of insurance and 15% extra administrative burden of applying care are the big culprits, in addition to extra costs on medicine and machinery. But it's interesting. Why is it that a comparatively deregulated and privatized system has so much extra pricing cost from bureaucracy?
Much like home prices. Everybody says they want homes to be more affordable, but all actions are designed to keep them high and if they did actually fall it would be treated as an emergency.
Physician salary is only 9% of total healthcare cost. The rest of the labor pool is administrative - clerks, management, etc.
Physicians also make 2-3x more than physicians in other countries. Why? Their education cost is also 2-3x higher than in other countries.
Hospitals and procedures are expensive, in part because of insurance. Insurance is high because our society is too litigious. It's also expensive because of consolidated private healthcare systems that can control and mark up prices due to lack of competition.
Other countries spend half what we do on healthcare. And their people are often healthier.
The entire 'gig economy' model is exploitation. It only works because of income inequality. It requires a large pool of workers who don't make enough money to support themselves (due to insane healthcare and housing costs, and low wages and benefits) and thus will take any money they can get, despite the poor pay, long hours, and lack of benefits. It's taking a person slowly dying of thirst and offering them a thimble of water in exchange for knitting a sock.
Nurses already deserve higher wages than what they already get, but introducing "dynamic pricing" and competition to under-bid each other is just disgusting.
Nurses form the backbone of healthcare. Treat them as such.
Edit: To those downvoting me, talk to a real nurse and I bet you wouldn't take twice the pay to do half the work they have to deal with.
There's no concept of "deserving higher wages". It's a popular online meme but what on Earth does it even capture? If you value the work higher, then pay them more and you'll win the market for that labour.
There's a good argument to say that sufficiently aggregated marketplaces can launder price collusion, and if we were in such an aggregated marketplace then you could make that argument. But we're not in that situation right now.
The 'Edit:' is even more confusing. If I talk to someone in a profession and I wouldn't take twice the pay they receive to do half the work they do then they deserve higher wages? But that list is huge. Congressmen, Senators, many CEOs, Wagner-group mercenaries, ICE officers, drone pilots. In fact, almost every profession has this 4x effective slippage you're talking about.
Go ahead and downvote me for this, but the medical field in the US especially when it comes to RNs needs a shake up. This is going to sound very crass, but the only skill that your average person on the street doesn’t have that nurses have is to stick a needle in a vein and that’s something that can be taught to a lay person over a week. Pretty much everything else are skills that any person off the street possesses and we would do well to have a lower bar for entry for it.
It was only a matter of time and I said (half) jokingly at the time that Uber is breaking the dam for everyone else to follow. Any regulated system will have its day in front of "disruptions" where the disruption is simply ignoring the regulation with some flimsy excuse, supported only by the money and lack of morals of VCs and startup combinators.
Uber took an axe to taxi drivers which weren't a popular group to begin with so that was easy. With the "disruption" perfected, next up are doctors, nurses, lawyers, electricians, cooks, engineers, the sky is the limit.
TBF it’s also an engine to push for regulations review. Awful lot of regulations are written for an age that no longer exists and just as many are to make management easier therefore startups pushing the boundaries actually a correcting mechanism.
It has been my observation that the companies all had plans to "disrupt"...but it seems they never had a solid "profitable" plan past when the VC money ran out.
Aside from turning employees into contractors...most of which have not done the math on how much they are losing through having to use your own car with no employee benefits. Doordash/Uber start looking a lot less attractive if you figure in the $.65/mile costs (fuel, repairs, insurance, car purchase price) that you would be paid by most govt or "real" companies. Almost everyone I know who does Doordash makes about $20/hr (which isn't good anyways) and they are not figuring in the costs of the vehicle.
If you set yourself up as an LLC for your uber driving, can you take the standard mileage rate as an expense?
You don’t need an LLC to do this. Just filing a Schedule C will do.
so either people aren't mathing or the frictionless experience is actually of value...
I have heard a couple of times -- Uber, but for prostitution.
To what degree is this just another symptom of the US healthcare system being flawed and in need of rework? To what degree would anyone use such a service if the costs remained high?
I used Zocdoc in the past to find a doctor and ended up with a doctor who just charged out-of-pocket instead of insurance, and it worked great. Would an app that shows up-front pricing be better for the consumer?
The costs are not high. It's the prices that are too high.
I don't really know, but according to one graph, US nursing salaries are second only to Luxembourg:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
Red herring; high salaries are fine for people who actually directly interact with patients https://hmpi.org/2026/07/10/the-growth-in-healthcare-adminis...
Breaking: Richest Country has higher wages.
Ratio to average wages is 0.9 last with Switzerland.
Maybe we'd have more money to fix the problem if "nursing at home" wasn't one of the main medicare fraud schemes that has persisted for years now.
> another symptom of the US healthcare system
You know the videos of those couriers eating your food and claiming that it was delivered?
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
This is marketed to hospitals to fill shifts rather than nurse-to-consumer which has been available for a long time.
> found that some platforms "use data-brokers to determine nurse debt levels and offer lower wages to those with highest debt loads."
We can assume all gig economy companies do this? Brave new world indeed.
Wondering if regular companies are doing this as well.
yes
Apparently most hospitals make low margins. If this is true, and the goal is to make healthcare more affordable, something has to give, no?
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/key-facts-about-hospitals/?...
It is also unclear how this is any different than traveling nurses which operate similarly.
What is the solution that doesn’t result in at least some large group of people making less money?
Among the things that need to give are 1) insurance companies making no money because there's no margin left in the system for them, and 2) several times as many doctors, which means breaking the protection racket that intentionally limits the supply.
Most hospitals (both for-profit and non-profit) are terribly inefficient. They burn up clinician time on administrative tasks that could be automated or performed by cheaper office staff or not done at all. And employees often waste a lot of time just waiting around because no one has optimized workflows to shorten queues or eliminate bottlenecks. The incentives are structured in a such a way that there's often little reason to improve.
check the admin headcount vs healthcare worker last time I looked up admin grew exponentially
It’s a complex problem because a lot of those hospitals are non profit, so they have zero incentives to have high margins because no shareholders to return money to. Higher salaries for executives though…
It’s important to note that in most countries the law even states that they need to pay competitive salaries for these positions, so they can’t even pay them much lower amounts than their non profit counterparts
It's REALLY important to understand that non profits have just as much incentive to maximize their income as for profits.
They have no stock holders to pay, but the people running them will pay themselves multi million dollar wages if they can!
The exact profit margins of hospitals as a whole doesn't matter. Hospitals are where health care happens but financially, they are simply a platform for a multitude of other private entities which make profits on top of the simple hospital fees - the "Uber For Nurses" thing is just one of many ways this happens, you have everything from data management companies to separately own MRI machines adding to the patient's bill and having a voice in the management of the hospital.
Traveling nurses make more than lots of doctors though, so I dont think they're being taken advantage of. However, Im sure this company is trying to take a piece of that traveling nurse pie.
Yeah, maybe it's the idea that hospitals should make profit that should give?
Like, sorry, but not being from the US the whole idea of a "margin" when running a hospital is insane. Hospitals are paid from our ample taxes and the patient pays nothing - there is no room for profit there, not should there be one.
How much does your country’s medical professionals make, how long do patients wait for care and what is the level of care as measured by variety and efficacy? Seems hard to compare without normalizing these things.
>How much does your country’s medical professionals make
Let's assume UK. Less. US physicians earn about twice what their UK peers do, US RNs about 1.5x https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
>how long do patients wait for care
About the same or longer, in general UK consumes less healthcare per person, but...
>what is the level of care
Better outcomes in the UK https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst... and longer UK life expectancy https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla... (and of course US has higher levels of chronic illness https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how-has...
All for far less (share of GDP) than US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?locat...
Lord have mercy. The last thing you want is under paid, lower quality nurses. If you're for that, you've never had a hospital stay.
To be fair US health care system is sort of similar to old NYC taxi driver cartels before Uber. Just try to get price quote ahead of procedure...
Ripe for disruption!
Could I use this app to hire a nurse and get a diagnosis from home? If we can start getting even meagre medical treatment to skip insurance / other middle men, I could see this having a great impact on healthcare prices, especially since AI is such a good information extractor, which is 90% of the role doctors play anyway.
Generally speaking nurses in the united states cannot provide a diagnosis, at least without jeopardizing their license. You can already find a doctor using a service like Zocdoc who may cut out middlemen, though regulatory capture has made it close to impossible to meaningfully reduce costs in this way. I would not recommend using AI to diagnose or treat yourself (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/well/ai-chatgpt-medicatio..., for instance) without the help of somebody highly trained to interpret this information and make good decisions.
Nurses don't really do diagnosis, but follow the ones doctors give. (Except for trivial things)
Otherwise I unfortunately know plenty of doctors that could easily be replaced by an LLM, but for now I prefer a diagnosis from a real doctor (who may use AI as a tool).
Seems like illegal wage fixing collusion by employers with the extra step of technology.
While I do understand the importance of training, degrees and experience I see that people in the medical field beyond Doctors seem to have a very holier than thou attitude probably because they have 10 edge cases of how MRI can go wrong drilled into them (MRI technicians), not everyone is comfortable with needles and human body (nurses) and because it seems that only Pharmacists can sort and provide us the right medicines when in fact it can be easily done by some robots.
In before someone says that your reasoning is flawed because that is very incorrect perception of the field. All I see is that regulatory capture has worked very well here and is simply stopping totally novel and practical ideas which work on tradeoffs from even taking off
> A companion Roosevelt Institute brief found that some platforms "use data-brokers to determine nurse debt levels and offer lower wages to those with highest debt loads."
thanks free market
I'm investing in guillotines. I have a feeling they're going to be hot.
Everyone wants healthcare expenses to go down but the biggest healthcare expense is the salaries of providers. So, hard to give the masses what they want without making a smaller group of people who benefit from the status quo angry.
Physician and nurse salaries account for only 15% of healthcare spending.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
to be a bit pedantic, that says they account for only 15% of the excess healthcare spending, relative to other countries. It's not surprising given doctors in the united states have a higher level of training compared with many peer countries, and _all_ salaries are much higher in the united states compared with almost any country.
The 15% extra administrative cost of insurance and 15% extra administrative burden of applying care are the big culprits, in addition to extra costs on medicine and machinery. But it's interesting. Why is it that a comparatively deregulated and privatized system has so much extra pricing cost from bureaucracy?
I’m sure there is some savings to be found within the insurance industry who regularly reports earnings in the billions.
Hospital administration costs are 20-30% of healthcare costs. [1]
[1] https://www.trillianthealth.com/market-research/studies/hosp...
Much like home prices. Everybody says they want homes to be more affordable, but all actions are designed to keep them high and if they did actually fall it would be treated as an emergency.
The whole ecosystem of companies trying to make a profit from each thing along the way isnt efficient. Other countries just nationalize instead
How about we gut the insurance companies that are blowing the price of everything in healthcare and not leverage the desperation of nurses?
We just need to educate a lot more doctors and nurses. That would lower salaries and provide a lot more care.
Last I heard the AMA controls how many doctors can be educated.
Physician salary is only 9% of total healthcare cost. The rest of the labor pool is administrative - clerks, management, etc.
Physicians also make 2-3x more than physicians in other countries. Why? Their education cost is also 2-3x higher than in other countries.
Hospitals and procedures are expensive, in part because of insurance. Insurance is high because our society is too litigious. It's also expensive because of consolidated private healthcare systems that can control and mark up prices due to lack of competition.
Other countries spend half what we do on healthcare. And their people are often healthier.
Does this mean that as a customer I can select only nurses that don't have fake degrees?
You'll only get that option on the Premium tier.
Uber for talk therapy / psychology is dog shit, I’m sure this will be too.
The entire 'gig economy' model is exploitation. It only works because of income inequality. It requires a large pool of workers who don't make enough money to support themselves (due to insane healthcare and housing costs, and low wages and benefits) and thus will take any money they can get, despite the poor pay, long hours, and lack of benefits. It's taking a person slowly dying of thirst and offering them a thimble of water in exchange for knitting a sock.
Could not the IRS fix this in one swoop by declaring that "gig workers" are employees?
Presumably, but what do you think the lobbyists are for?
In the case of Uber it's bring your own thimble too
Nurses already deserve higher wages than what they already get, but introducing "dynamic pricing" and competition to under-bid each other is just disgusting.
Nurses form the backbone of healthcare. Treat them as such.
Edit: To those downvoting me, talk to a real nurse and I bet you wouldn't take twice the pay to do half the work they have to deal with.
There's no concept of "deserving higher wages". It's a popular online meme but what on Earth does it even capture? If you value the work higher, then pay them more and you'll win the market for that labour.
There's a good argument to say that sufficiently aggregated marketplaces can launder price collusion, and if we were in such an aggregated marketplace then you could make that argument. But we're not in that situation right now.
The 'Edit:' is even more confusing. If I talk to someone in a profession and I wouldn't take twice the pay they receive to do half the work they do then they deserve higher wages? But that list is huge. Congressmen, Senators, many CEOs, Wagner-group mercenaries, ICE officers, drone pilots. In fact, almost every profession has this 4x effective slippage you're talking about.
Go ahead and downvote me for this, but the medical field in the US especially when it comes to RNs needs a shake up. This is going to sound very crass, but the only skill that your average person on the street doesn’t have that nurses have is to stick a needle in a vein and that’s something that can be taught to a lay person over a week. Pretty much everything else are skills that any person off the street possesses and we would do well to have a lower bar for entry for it.
Another torment nexus banger.
Tech bros: "It's Uber and Doge for nursing!"
Like nurses are just an expense.