Don't confuse "regulation" with "guild systems".

Taxi drivers were not more "regulated" in any meaningful way, in fact oversight of them was significantly worse than the community-driven Uber rating system (not that that doesn't also have flaws).

Some regulation is bad, some regulation is good. There's basically nothing at all that's good about guild systems and I will celebrate each of them facing open market competition.

It has been my observation that the companies all had plans to "disrupt"...but it seems they never had a solid "profitable" plan past when the VC money ran out.

Aside from turning employees into contractors...most of which have not done the math on how much they are losing through having to use your own car with no employee benefits. Doordash/Uber start looking a lot less attractive if you figure in the $.65/mile costs (fuel, repairs, insurance, car purchase price) that you would be paid by most govt or "real" companies. Almost everyone I know who does Doordash makes about $20/hr (which isn't good anyways) and they are not figuring in the costs of the vehicle.

This trend was started in health care by private equity with no inspiration from Uber. Check your local dentists, eye doctors, veterinarians, urgent cares, maybe even hospitals. You'll find very few that are not owned by some large private equity firm these days, who run everything at the highest margins possible. And once you eliminate any higher quality / higher paying positions in an area, moving to pricing on demand and getting rid of full time positions entirely comes next.

TBF it’s also an engine to push for regulations review. Awful lot of regulations are written for an age that no longer exists and just as many are to make management easier therefore startups pushing the boundaries actually are a correcting mechanism.

Unfortunately some harm can be inflicted bur IMHO it’s better than the alternative.

There was an “Uber for X” wave that didn’t really amount to anything. Stuff like home repairs was a big one. My take was that driving (and delivery) is a rare service that above some basic competence (and I’d say below another) is a pure commodity. For most things, quality is a differentiator, and anyone good would never give up a percentage to an app, so only the worst providers would sign up. My intuition is that nursing would work this way.

They aren’t attacking regulation but full time employment. They spent a tremendous amount of money in CA to pass a law that’s nearly unable to be repealed to avoid having their gig folks count as employees. That’s the attack - everyone being a 1099. Not regulated industries.

Uber "deregulating" everything, means Uber taxing everything... because everything will go through it... and you know the EEE thingy right? better prices until you kill industry, then rise prices...

The good thing is that we will not be fooled this time while checking the dead bird thing...

Not only were taxi drivers not popular but it also wasn't and isn't obvious to most people exactly how or why they were regulated. Especially to people outside of major urban areas.

I do not think this will hold with nursing.

I have heard a couple of times -- Uber, but for prostitution.

Well, at least on case of taxi drivers "the flimsy excuse" phrasing applies more to existing regulation than not following it.

Not sure about the nurses, but my grandmothers were able to afford live-in caretakers in old age, without any government help or having much money, because these are completely unregulated (outside the US; or the regulation is not enforced)... We found good ones thru word of mouth, exactly the approach apps can scale

Being long degeneracy ( https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy ) really seems to be the correct market position. Turns out laws really are optional, if you're brazen enough.

That will only happen until they step on the wrong toes.

I can't wait until they disrupt something a cartel or the mafia are in on.

... funny thing, that. How about Uber for Amazon? Literally just gigwork in the warehouses at this point, in four hour shift chunklets.

https://hiring.amazon.com/promotions/anytime-shifts

American Tech Firms: fucking over society one segment at a time.

The costs are not high. It's the prices that are too high.

Maybe we'd have more money to fix the problem if "nursing at home" wasn't one of the main medicare fraud schemes that has persisted for years now.

> another symptom of the US healthcare system

You know the videos of those couriers eating your food and claiming that it was delivered?

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

This is marketed to hospitals to fill shifts rather than nurse-to-consumer which has been available for a long time.

> To what degree is this just another symptom of the US healthcare system being flawed?

100%.

Nobody living in a country with healthcare for all with no out of pocket costs would ever care about such a thing.

I spend as much time thinking about “fixing” my healthcare as I do thinking about fixing the supermarket or the roads around here.

Ie not one second because they work perfectly.

It’s the symptom of a system where more and more wealth goes to few people and the rest has to fight for the rest of wealth

Uber checked the first few digits of your debit card to filter out police officer credit unions to evade taxi regulation enforcement. They use your phone’s battery level as one factor to estimate your elasticity of demand. They have teams of economists to adjust personalized prices to as high as you can bear and pay for drivers as low as possible.

Wondering if regular companies are doing this as well.

Among the things that need to give are 1) insurance companies should make no money because there's no margin left in the system for them, and 2) we should have several times as many doctors, which means breaking the protection racket that intentionally limits the supply.

Most hospitals (both for-profit and non-profit) are terribly inefficient. They burn up clinician time on administrative tasks that could be automated or performed by cheaper office staff or not done at all. And employees often waste a lot of time just waiting around because no one has optimized workflows to shorten queues or eliminate bottlenecks. The incentives are structured in a such a way that there's often little reason to improve.

It’s a complex problem because a lot of those hospitals are non profit, so they have zero incentives to have high margins because no shareholders to return money to. Higher salaries for executives though…

check the admin headcount vs healthcare worker last time I looked up admin grew exponentially

Traveling nurses make more than lots of doctors though, so I dont think they're being taken advantage of. However, Im sure this company is trying to take a piece of that traveling nurse pie.

The exact profit margins of hospitals as a whole doesn't matter. Hospitals are where health care happens but financially, they are simply a platform for a multitude of other private entities which make profits on top of the simple hospital fees - the "Uber For Nurses" thing is just one of many ways this happens, you have everything from data management companies to separately own MRI machines adding to the patient's bill and having a voice in the management of the hospital.

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Yeah, maybe it's the idea that hospitals should make profit that should give?

Like, sorry, but not being from the US the whole idea of a "margin" when running a hospital is insane. Hospitals are paid from our ample taxes and the patient pays nothing - there is no room for profit there, not should there be one.

Generally speaking nurses in the united states cannot provide a diagnosis, at least without jeopardizing their license. You can already find a doctor using a service like Zocdoc who may cut out middlemen, though regulatory capture has made it close to impossible to meaningfully reduce costs in this way. I would not recommend using AI to diagnose or treat yourself (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/well/ai-chatgpt-medicatio..., for instance) without the help of somebody highly trained to interpret this information and make good decisions.

Nurses don't really do diagnosis, but follow the ones doctors give. (Except for trivial things)

Otherwise I unfortunately know plenty of doctors that could easily be replaced by an LLM, but for now I prefer a diagnosis from a real doctor (who may use AI as a tool).

There are many types of nurses, for example Nurse Practitioners have masters or doctorates of nursing can do much or all of what a doctor could within their specific scopes.

If you really believe that information extraction is 90% of what doctors do then you're deeply ignorant about how healthcare actually works and not qualified to even have an opinion on this subject.

I cant even afford a hospital stay.

Physician and nurse salaries account for only 15% of healthcare spending.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

Much like home prices. Everybody says they want homes to be more affordable, but all actions are designed to keep them high and if they did actually fall it would be treated as an emergency.

I’m sure there is some savings to be found within the insurance industry who regularly reports earnings in the billions.

Hospital administration costs are 20-30% of healthcare costs. [1]

[1] https://www.trillianthealth.com/market-research/studies/hosp...

In Sweden we had this in the news: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/hon-pendlar-860-mi... A US nurse moved to Sweden and preferred to fly to San Fransisco to work ten days at a time, then fly back to be off for six weeks, rather than taking a job as a nurse in Sweden. The salaries are very different.

The whole ecosystem of companies trying to make a profit from each thing along the way isnt efficient. Other countries just nationalize instead

How about we gut the insurance companies that are blowing the price of everything in healthcare and not leverage the desperation of nurses?

We just need to educate a lot more doctors and nurses. That would lower salaries and provide a lot more care.

Last I heard the AMA controls how many doctors can be educated.

Physician salary is only 9% of total healthcare cost. The rest of the labor pool is administrative - clerks, management, etc.

Physicians also make 2-3x more than physicians in other countries. Why? Their education cost is also 2-3x higher than in other countries.

Hospitals and procedures are expensive, in part because of insurance. Insurance is high because our society is too litigious. It's also expensive because of consolidated private healthcare systems that can control and mark up prices due to lack of competition.

Other countries spend half what we do on healthcare. And their people are often healthier.

Could not the IRS fix this in one swoop by declaring that "gig workers" are employees?

In the case of Uber it's bring your own thimble too

This sounds like pure insecurity with a sprinkle of Dunning Kruger. Unless I'm missing the joke somewhere? Nurses don't mind needles is the only difference? I must be missing the joke.

> Like I said, to be clear, I don’t begrudge anyone’s salaries - this is just an under discussed point when we talk about healthcare costs

You are begrudging someone’s salary. Nurses make 500k by working overtime. You know why they work overtime? Because it’s cheaper for the hospital than to hire 2 nurses. The problem isn’t the nursing salaries. It is the administrative costs that make your healthcare too expensive. Why do you think single payer reduces healthcare costs?

PS: median nursing salaries are still under a $100k. The numbers you pointed to are not the norm.

There's no concept of "deserving higher wages". It's a popular online meme but what on Earth does it even capture? If you value the work higher, then pay them more and you'll win the market for that labour.

There's a good argument to say that sufficiently aggregated marketplaces can launder price collusion, and if we were in such an aggregated marketplace then you could make that argument. But we're not in that situation right now.

The 'Edit:' is even more confusing. If I talk to someone in a profession and I wouldn't take twice the pay they receive to do half the work they do then they deserve higher wages? But that list is huge. Congressmen, Senators, many CEOs, Wagner-group mercenaries, ICE officers, drone pilots. In fact, almost every profession has this 4x effective slippage you're talking about.

You'll only get that option on the Premium tier.

Ahh yes, its the $30.00 an hour nurses that drive up the costs and not the incestuous and corrupt monopolies of hospital groups and insurance companies who've been caught a hundred times cartelizing the health care sector.

Insurance companies were the largest purchasers of private jets last year because they were so flush with cash.

When something sounds too bad to be true, I think it's fair that we should ask for some kind of evidence to be produced. They cite a Roosevelt Institute article that says

"Gig nursing apps MAY [my caps] determine pay by what the firm knows about how much a nurse was willing to accept for a previous assignment, how often they bid for shifts, or how much credit card or other kinds of debt they might hold."

That kind of sounds like they are overselling a hypothetical. Even just an "insiders familiar with the matter have told us that it IS happening", would make me believe it more.

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I don't think you know what nurses do.

Nurses change dressings. Insert catheters. Move heavy patients without hurting themselves. Prepare equipment for surgery. Ensure the sterile field is maintained. Operate specialized equipment. Triage medical emergencies.

And about a million other things that the average person doesn't know how to do.

Many industries (medicine, law, engineering, etc.) need huge "deregulation" shakeups; massive expensive legal and financial grifts going on