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Certificate-of-Need Laws Prevent Access to Lifesaving Medical Technology

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in
the United States. In large part, that’s because less than half of
the population that should be getting screened isn’t getting
screened.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Medical science has found a way
to use CT scanners to do screenings non-invasively, negating the
need to insert a colonoscope into the rectum and large intestine.
But for regulatory hurdles, people could just go to a clinic, pay
for a quick photo & analysis session and be on their way.

However, as of 2010, 13 states require medical institutions to
get permission, in the form of a “certificate of need,” before
purchasing new CT scanners. Other states require doctors to obtain
a certificate of need before offering new medical procedures like
virtual colonoscopies, which are still relatively cutting edge.

From Darpana Sheth of the Institute for Justice, writing in the

Daily Caller:

In a lengthy and expensive process, verging on full-blown
litigation, medical providers must demonstrate a “need” for the
proposed services. Worse, existing healthcare facilities are
invited to oppose and defeat a would-be competitor’s application.
This process results in a de-facto “certificate of monopoly” for
favored established businesses.

Consider entrepreneur and physician Dr. Mark Baumel. He wanted
to open several “one-stop shops” for colon health in Virginia that
would provide virtual colonoscopies along with same-day polyp
removal, just as he does at his flagship facility in Delaware.
Unlike Delaware, Virginia prohibits purchasing a CT scanner without
first obtaining a certificate of need. And yet, Virginia’s
Department of Health has denied Dr. Baumel a certificate of
need.

None of Dr. Baumel's potential competitors even offer the
service that he wants to provide. But they could. And
state health planners apparently think protecting existing
businesses from even the possibility of competition is more
important than patient access to potentially lifesaving
screenings.

Baumel is suing Virginia, with the help of the Institute for
Justice. See more Reason coverage of certificate-of-need
laws here
and
here.

Disclosure: I am a former employee of the Institute for
Justice.

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The 17-Year-Old That Yahoo Paid $30 Million Was Renting His Startup's Core Technology

Yahoo's weird-looking Summly acquisition is looking weirder by the minute.

Yahoo made big news this week when it bought Summly, a startup with a 17-year-old CEO named Nick D'Aloisio, for $30 million.

The acquisition was led by Yahoo HR boss Jackie Reeses.

Before Yahoo shut it down, Summly was an app that skimmed the world's sources of news, edited it all down to fewer words, and distributed it to readers in a personalized way.

Yesterday, we pointed out that the deal was odd for several reasons:

• Summly never had many users or any revenues. Yahoo is shutting the app down. Yahoo is saying the point of the deal is to have Summly's CEO help lead the company in mobile.
• But Summly's CEO lives in London, where he is staying to finish school
• The CEO has only promised to stay at Yahoo for the next 18 months.  
• The CEO is 17-years-old. We don't buy that he's going to be able to lead or inspire adult Yahoo engineers and designers.

Now, Cornell professor Emin Gün Sirer points out another glaring issue with the deal: Summly's didn't invent or own its core technology. 

Sirer writes: "Summly licensed its core technology from SRI, which, previously, spun out Siri and sold it to Apple."

"They licensed the core engine from another company. They are the quintessential bolt-on engineers, taking a Japanese bike engine, slapping together a badly constructed frame aligned solely by eyeballs, and laying down a marketing blitz."

So let's review: Yahoo bought a startup to acquire its talent.

But that talent lives 10,000 miles away, is still finishing high school, and is not actually responsible for the startup's core technology.

This has us suspicious that they are other reasons Yahoo bought Summly.

Some possible explanations:

• Summly has an impressive list of angel investors, including Brian Chesky, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenwegg, Li-Kai Shing, and Josh Kushner. These people are influential with lots of startups that Yahoo will want to acquire some day. Maybe Yahoo has decided spending $30 million to give one of their disappointing startups a safe landing is a way to get on their good side. Certainly Yahoo has some rehabilitation to do with Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs.
• Yahoo is getting tons of press in the mainstream media for making a teenager a millionaire. The CEO is on the Today Show this morning. $30 million is not a lot of money to spend for so much "earned media," as marketing people call mentions in the press.

Big picture it's important to remember that $30 million is not that much for Yahoo to spend.

It's less than .75% of Yahoo's available cash.

Still…$30 million here and $30 million there starts to add up in a way that will eventually make bigger deals less possible.

By the way: None of this is meant to take anything away from what founder Nick D'Aloisio did with Summly. That guy is a pure hustler, and he earned every penny of his millions.

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The Biggest Problem In Technology

PyCon is the largest annual conference dedicated to the open-source Python programming language; it counts among its sponsors Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Normally, it is exactly as boring and unremarkable as a gathering of twenty-five hundred programming-language enthusiasts sounds. But this year, on March 17th, two employees of PlayHaven, a company that develops tools for video-game marketing, made a couple of jokes while sitting in the tenth row of a “lightning talk.” One of the jokes was about “big dongles.” It was a dick joke. (Amy Poehler has made a similar joke on national television, at Best Buy’s behest.) The other joke, according to a commenter on Hacker News, who claimed to be one of the two employees, was a remark that “I would fork that guys [sic] repo.” It was, “mr-hank” claimed, a reference to the fact that taking a developer’s code repository and “forking” the code, creating a new development based on the original, is a new form of flattery—in other words, not sexual in nature. Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, was sitting in front of the pair, and overheard their conversation. She could, as she later wrote on her blog, “feel [her] face getting flustered.” Then she took the above picture of the men and tweeted it to thousands of followers, with the hashtag #PyCon. She captioned it, “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles.” PyCon organizers swooped in, talked to the PlayHaven employees, and declared the situation “dealt with” on Twitter. Click here to read more > Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

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