Compassion by pure results

The current junior doctor strike and the NHS crisis is no surprise. The NHS system fundamentally provides healthcare for all individuals even those who are unable to pay for it using taxes.

Someone will eventually have to pay for the healthcare of individuals who are unable to afford healthcare.

In societies with a strong economy, this can be paid for by a highly profitable sector, such as the oil and gas industry (in the middle east) through taxation. However, the UK does not have such a luxury. The other sectors of the economy are simply not strong enough to fund the NHS.

So, the NHS is still providing healthcare to all individual regardless whether they pay enough taxes to fund their care. So who is paying for it?

Doctors and healthcare workers. When many people who are unable to pay taxes use the healthcare system, the bottom line of the NHS increases. The only way in which to fund the increasing costs it through taxation. However, if these people don’t pay taxes, then how else are we going to fund this increase in costs? Well, the solution of the NHS is not to fund these increased costs but to cut costs. But what is the fastest way to cut costs? Reduce the pay of doctors and healthcare workers despite the increasing workload and demand of healthcare.

You might think that innovation and efficiency is the way to increase costs in the long term, but it certaintly seems that the NHS has failed to take this direction. But rightly with the progress and development of LLMs and advanced general AI, costs within the service industry have a more realistic chance of being reduced and automation of the service industry may finally be possible. In fact, I see a future where the provision of healthcare would be automated and the new role of the doctors will be akin to the role of software engineers, to modify and improve the AI systems to improve the automated system which provides healthcare. Software engineers do not serve every customer, but rather the automated system serves the customer and the software engineers serves the automated system by improving them. I am assuming that this would be the end game for efficiency and affordable healthcare in the long term. Particularly, there is still a need for doctors with the domain knoweldge of medicine, with an understanding of basic and clinial sciences to be able to design the algorithms effectively, however, such professional skill will no longer be applied in the form of a non-scalable service in serving patients directly, but rather to use the knowledge and skills to constantly build and improve automated healthcare provision systems. This new profession which I call the “Healing engineers” or “Doctor engineers” will become more important than ever in a future were affordable healthcare is truly affordable for all.

In the current healthcare system, it is easy to understand why all parties involved in healthcare are unhappy. Healthcare is the truly the parasite of the economy and it is a parasite that the economy can soon no longer afford to keep around. Healthcare needs to transform from a parasite into the rocket ship that propels the economy forward to new heights.

In the current healthcare system, doctors are unhappy because they are paid increasingly less with an increasing amount of workload. Patients are unhappy because doctors cannot completely meet the ever-increasing healthcare demand, resulting in lower quality of healthcare, longer waiting times and a greater amount of suffering. The public are angry because of the ever increasing taxes that they have to pay to fund their own healthcare system, it becomes to a point where additional taxation to fund the healthcare system becomes increasingly unaffordable for the average tax payer, simply because the tax payers simply do not provide enough value to the economy to afford the ever increasing costs of healthcare.

In such crisis situations, short-term thinking will prevail, emotions will get into way of pure logic and good problem solving skills. For many doctors, the clear solution in response to a healthcare system that pays badly, with a poor work life balance and poor respect and treatment from the public and the system is to move somewhere else, or to push for a private healthcare system.

However, the move to a private healthcare system actually brings us back to square one, from where we came from in the past. Before the NHS, doctors were paid well and patients were happy with healthcare, tax payers did not have to fund healthcare, so lower taxes means that tax payers are happy too. It was a situation in which all parties that are involved in healthcare are happy. But what was the problem then. The problem then is the same as the problem today, while all particpants in the healthcare system were happy (doctors and patients and taxpayers), most of the poorer population simply could not afford healthcare and simply died an early death due to the inaccessiblity of healthcare. The NHS was created to be compassionate, to be compassionate to the people that are unable to afford healthcare, but such compassion comes at a cost, at the cost of the doctors, the patients and the tax payers. In this situation, people who are poor benefit because now they have access to healthcare, other patients who are able to pay do not benefit because now there are longer waiting times (even though they already paid the same price in taxes for healthcare), and general tax payers lose out because the they have to pay higher taxes even though they do not use the healthcare system.

With such an illustration, it has become clear that the NHS has not served to increase the value generated in the economy, but rather it has simply redistributed the pie, it has redistributed the value from the taxpayers and the paying patients to the poor. This is a clear demonstration of compassion within the society. The winners of the game and the rule in which society is defined by have a duty to protect and help the people who have lost the game, simply because winner and losers of the game are result of genetic variation and necessary inequalities to ensure the survival and adaptability of our species.

But we cannot be compassionate just by splitting the pie differently. The way to be compassionate is to grow the pie. We need to bake a pie so big that every individual will be so full that we will have left overs of the pie. The way to truly be compassionate is to generate raw and massive value for the economy through extreme efficiency in healthcare. Perhaps efficiency is the wrong word to use here, because the word ‘efficiency’ implies a degree of optimisation of the current system. However, what is truly needed is to find an out of the box solution of a different and incommensurable paradigm that will allow us to re-imagine the rules of healthcare and re-imagine our assumptions of healthcare. We assume that the cost of cancer treatment will cost ten to a hundred thousand dollars. What if the cost can be less than a Big Mac?

The way to truly be compassionate is through pure results, pure value and pure efficiency. We can be compassionate to serve even the poorest people without the tax payers complaining because as long as the poorest people can afford to feed themselves and keep them alive, they should be able to afford to pay for their healthcare, that is how cheap healthcare should get. Healthcare should not be the limiting factor of affordability, but rather access of healthcare should be limited by the requirement of staying alive and eating food to receive healthcare. Tax would be low, tax payers would be happy, doctor engineers will be happy with high pay, and patient will be happy, with quick and instantaneous service.

In this AI summer, the shift from doctors to doctor engineers starts today, and let’s start our conquest for undeniable compassion, raw compassion dictated by pure value generation.