Lympo: How Crypto Could Help My Mom

The American healthcare system is designed for profit, not recovery. Its function is the opposite of what its designation would imply. We should call it 'deathcare'. Parasitic insurance and pharmaceutical companies whose bottom line is profit, not saving people, dominate America. This country produces more wealth than any place in the history of our species. The result is what we see today.

Instead of solving addiction epidemics, we respond with 'wars' on drugs. America has a culture of fear about healthcare. “Don’t call the f-ing ambulance.” We crunch the numbers instinctively. "That would be $10,000." "A hospital visit? Hell no. That’s tens of thousands of dollars." "How bad is the pain? The cut? The illness? Can you get through it? Can you sew your own stitches?"

Oh, but didn’t Obama fix everything? Yeah right. The shill made a federal law for insurance, not universal coverage. But we can afford to drone strike children in Pakistan.

Sorry. I know this is supposed to be about Lympo. And it is. But I can’t address the potential use-value of this crypto without highlighting the horrors of the American healthcare system. It’s just too close to home.

I’ll give you a quick personal example about my mom, how blockchain in general, and Lympo in particular, could make her life far easier than the Kafkaesque absurdity that she goes through now.

My mom has Parkinson's disease. She got diagnosed about a decade ago. Since then, she’s moved three times. In the process of moving from Maine to Iowa to Illinois, she’s had to change doctors and physical therapists and specialists each time. Most often, a neurologist.

Now, since she’s on medicare, she has to go to specific doctors, and, at least according to her, sometimes those doctors change, or the medicines change. The point is, medicare dictates which doctors and medicines she’s able to see and receive, and often that isn’t even enough (she cuts her medicine sometimes to get through the month).

When she has to switch practitioners, whether because of medicare-bullshit, or because she’s moved, that necessitates paperwork and transferring patient records. As Vox states, “One federal report found that as of 2013, 59 percent of hospitals are using a basic electronic record system — which means 4 in 10 hospitals aren't” (source)

They use pen and paper or computers but don’t maintain an overall electronic database. Each time she’s had to move to a different doctor or physical therapist or neurologist, she’s had to transfer records. This process takes time. She had to wait a month for records from Iowa to transfer to medicaid and back to her neurologist in Illinois. In the meantime, she might not have access to the meds she needs, or the doctor might prescribe her something different (despite her protests).

Further, as the Vox article states, if two hospitals or private practitioners use different vendors, they can’t openly share the medical information. Overall, a patient having complete control and access to their medical records is bad for business. It allows the patient to tell a crummy insurance-company-dominated system to go F itself, and instead pursue the avenue they think best. Having no control over your medical data and information means that information is held hostage by entities whose bottom line is not your own well-being, but profit.

In a very real, even simple way, my mom’s life would improve if medical information was stored on a blockchain, as Lympo could allow. Lympo could not only give control of medical data back to the patient, but streamline the method which that data is accessed. It could create a universal healthcare ledger, something we should have had yesterday.

Instead of vendors or hospitals or private practitioners having to haggle and fax and phone and obtain permission from XYZ to send my own mom’s health information, my mom could control it all using Lympo.

If she wants to go see a new specialist, she doesn’t have to get a headache about how she’s going to get her recent MRI scans over to the new doctor, along with all the medicine she’s currently taking to treat her illness. With Lympo, she could just show up and with a click of a button, access her data securely stored on a blockchain.

And it’s really that simple.

This isn’t even taking into account all the other plans that Lympo has, including creating an economic value system of health and fitness information that is produced by people participating in that system, effectively rewarding users for taking control of their own health and promoting a healthy lifestyle. Or rewarding physical therapists or personal trainers. Or utilizing reward systems at gyms, where your workout ends with you earning LYM tokens.

Why is it that when it comes to the broken American healthcare system, the solutions always seem to be simple? Always feasible? Always able to happen tomorrow, hell, now? It’s almost like there’s billion dollar industries stopping any and all progress...

---

This article is a submission to this week's original works contest.
lympo2018