Bad news: if you were still hoping to get one of the $400 juicers from Juicero, you may be out of luck. Juicero announced that they were suspending sales while they seek an acquirer. They'd already dropped the juicer's price from its initial $700 earlier this year and had hoped to find ways to drop it further, but ran out of time. I keep thinking: if they'd been a health care company, they not only might still be in business but also would probably be looking to raise their prices. Juicero once was the darling of investors. It raised $120 million from a variety of respected funding sources, including Kleiner Perkins, Alphabet and Campbell Soup. They weren't a juice company, or even an appliance company. They were a technology company! They had an Internet-of-Things product! They had an ongoing base of customers...
Elisabeth Rosenthal
See the following -
Health Care's Juicero Problem
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How the American Health Care Business Turned Patients into Consumers
A clash of cultures is rapidly developing among those of us who see the mission of the health care system to be primarily the diagnosis and healing of illness and those who see it primarily as an opportunity to create personal wealth. The concept of health care primarily as a business is uniquely American, and it has gained ascendancy during the last few decades. While there have always been a few greedy doctors, businessmen-wealth-seekers — not doctors — now dominate the medical-industrial complex.
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How U.S. Health Care Became Big Business
Health care is a trillion-dollar industry in America, but are we getting what we pay for? Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, a medical journalist who formerly worked as a medical doctor, warns that the existing system too often focuses on financial incentives over health or science. "We've trusted a lot of our health care to for-profit businesses and it's their job, frankly, to make profit," Rosenthal says. "You can't expect them to act like Mother Teresas"...
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