Politician Thinks Apple Watch Can Replace Obamacare
“On this device in five years will be applications that will allow me to manage my healthcare in ways that five years ago were not even possible. I’ll have the ability, someone will, you know, because of my blood sugar, … someone will send me a signal it’ll come here, I’ll get a double beep saying ‘you just ate a butterscotch sundae or something like that. You went way over the top. You’re a diabetic, you can’t do that’…”
[Jeb Bush’s] answer to the Affordable Care Act, it seems, is to give every citizen an Apple Watch. How the device will know that you ate a butterscotch sundae is left to the software engineers.
Try as we might, when a company’s as large and powerful as Apple, it’s almost impossible to ignore the political groundswell around the brand’s socially impactful devices. From waxing idiotic about the need for statistically ineffectual and selectively enforced punitive laws to using Apple Watch as a pawn in a fight to replace one public program with another, Apple — more than any other player in tech (save maybe Google) — gets caught in the net.
So while Jeb Bush thinks folks will vote for him because he claims Apple Watch can end Obamacare, he’s being disingenuous. The sad irony is that Bush — and everyone like him, on both sides — represents the largest roadblock to Apple’s ability to actually build such a powerful medical device in the first place.
I have no doubt that in a few years’ time, the wearable will offer an effective suite of deep health monitoring sensors on-board (to measure blood glucose, blood pressure, sleep apnea, etc.), but those will not and cannot replace traditional medicine. When it comes to regulated healthcare the world over, Apple Watch will never be allowed to be anything more than a symbiote within that larger industry. The reality is that, far from displacing the ACA, Apple Watch may end up being subsidized in part by that very program (or one like it). Indeed, I think Apple’s banking on that.
Also, I’d be remiss not to point out that, starting from scratch, it would cost around $320 billion — every 3-5 years — to outfit every American with an Apple Watch. And that just includes private sector hardware, not public sector overhead! (You’ll need to have an iPhone in order to use that new medical device, remember.) 320 million people at a $1000 a pop adds up. In fact, it adds right up to most of the cost estimates of the controversial law in question.
Politics!