Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast, I'm Hannah.

In some ways the coronavirus feels like something that came out of nowhere, a sort of black swan event.

But at the same time, it's also been exposing a lot of the fundamental cracks and flaws in our health care system that feel like a perfect storm when they all come together and have heard our ability to address a problem that many say we should actually have seen coming.

So we're here today to talk with A16Z general partners Jorge Conde and

Julie Yu about some of those big forces and dynamics in the health care system that led us to this moment

at the intersection of business, policy, and public health, and how in health care in particular, broken policy can lead to broken business models that in the wrong circumstances lead to major failures in public health like the one we're seeing

today. We talk about where we've seen this before in the markets of vaccines, antibiotics, and

diagnostics, and what should be different next time so that when a new pandemic hits, we aren't

facing another perfect storm.

Since we have talked quite a bit about some of the cracks on the health care system

side, let's start with the business or the market side. What was the underlying problem on the market side that got us here?

Much like a virus attacks the weaknesses in the human body.

This pandemic spreads by effectively attacking or exploiting the weaknesses across the health care system at large in the United States.

Health care is a fairly unique case in that this is one industry and one area where policy sets business models and where

you have bad policy you have bad business models which can lead to market

failures which can lead to public health failures.

We've seen it happen in the vaccines industry, we've seen it happen in diagnostics, we've seen it happen

in anti-infectives and antibiotics more broadly.

And so these aren't isolated examples where the system fails.

As a system, historically, we've made very little investment into prevention in general.

Really where the money has been made

is in the treatment of patients who get sick.

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