Capabilities that were once the province of only a handful of medical specialists can now be in everyone’s hands, promising care that’s more informed, accessible and responsive to patient needs…
— from an op-ed by Michael Botta in The Washington Post, April 22, 2025.
Michael Botta, co-founder and president of Sesame, a health-care marketplace, thinks health-care-oriented AI can save lives.
For half the price.
That would make American health care roughly as affordable as in Europe. But still not as affordable as in Mexico.
Sesame formed a partnership with Costco a couple of years ago, to offer health services.
All Costco Members can receive Sesame’s best pricing on a range of health services across all 50 states, such as:
- Virtual primary care, just $29.
- Mental health medication management, just $65/mo.
- Health check-ups (a standard lab panel, plus a virtual follow-up consultation with a provider), just $72.
- Virtual mental health therapy, just $79.
- Plus, 10% off of all other Sesame services, including in-person appointments.
I’m not a Costco member, mainly because we don’t have a Costco store in Pagosa Springs. But now, learning that my primary care could be handled through my iPhone, I’ve giving serious consideration to getting a membership.
I mean, virtual primary care for $29 sounds really good to me, compared to no primary care at all, which has been the case lately.
If I fell off the roof and broke my leg… sure, I would need a real doctor. But my phone, armed with AI, can probably diagnose a case of measles, with one hand tied behind its back. How many people have paid a doctor to diagnose measles? Once you have measles, you have measles, and there’s nothing a highly-trained doctor can do about it.
But none of our doctors, I think, are as highly trained as ChatGPT. CHatGPT was trained on billions of information sources, and uses about 30,000 Nvidia GPUs each costing approximately $10,000 each.
And apparently, ChatGPT is capable of getting a passing grade on the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), according to MedPageToday. The USMLE is the test a doctor has to take to get licensed after a total of 8 years of education, in college and then medical school.
ChatGPT didn’t spend even one day in medical school.
The Costco benefit I’d personally be most interested in, is the virtual mental health therapy for $79. Writing humor columns for the Daily Post puts a great deal of mental stress on the columnist, as he struggles to convert news about the horrible state of the world into humorous stories. It takes a toll, and the job doesn’t come with mental health insurance.
(Is there even such a thing as mental health insurance? There should be.)
I found an interesting story on Today.com about Alex, a young boy who began experiencing an unusual range of symptoms, including chronic pain. After visiting 17 different doctors over a three-year period, his mom typed the symptoms and the MRI data into ChatGPT and got the correct diagnosis: a tethered spinal cord. Alex underwent corrective surgery in 2023.
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, president of the American Medical Association, commented:
While AI products show tremendous promise in helping alleviate physician administrative burdens and may ultimately be successfully utilized in direct patient care, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI products currently have known issues and are not error free.
Speaking of being error free, we might mention the 17 doctors who spent three years giving Alex the wrong diagnosis, and who were not successfully utilized in direct patient care.
With that in mind, I decided to write to ChatGPT and find out what an average guy like myself could do about high blood pressure, without going through three years of the wrong treatment from doctors.
The app responded that I should eat more vegetables, whole grains, and nuts. Also, I should cut back on refined sugar, salt and saturated fats. I should get 7-9 hours of sleep, start meditating, and avoid toxic people.
I especially liked the suggestion to avoid toxic people.
ChatGPT also advised me to buy a blood pressure monitor (“they’re pretty affordable now”) and check my blood pressure “at the same time daily, rest 5 mins before, and track it over time.”
My visit to Dr. ChatGPT — which incidentally involved no need for an appointment — concluded with this offer:
Would you like help setting up a routine, meal plan, or tracking method? Or are you more into natural remedies and supplements too?
These all sounded like reasonable suggestions. And the offer of help setting up a routine or tracking method seemed quite generous, except that I don’t think AI can actually be “generous” in the normal sense of the word. I think it can only appear to be generous.
Which is sad, in a way. Appearing generous, without enjoying the pleasure of actually being generous.
I’m going to skip the blood pressure monitor suggestion, however. Checking my blood pressure always causes my blood pressure to jump.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.