Triage. The state of the world.
The United States spends more on healthcare than any country on Earth — about $4.9 trillion in 2024, roughly $15,000 per person, per year, the highest by far in the developed world. We get less for it. Life expectancy is below the OECD average and falling. Maternal mortality is roughly three times the rate in peer countries. Medical error remains a leading cause of death.
The interface most people meet the system through is broken in obvious ways. The average new‑patient wait for a physician in a major U.S. city is over 26 days. The average primary‑care visit, once you get one, is about 17 minutes. Telehealth fills part of the gap and bills like in‑person. Insurance forms gate basic questions. Portals are written in EHR vendor English, not human.
Meanwhile, the people inside the system are leaving it. Burnout among U.S. physicians sits above 50%. Half of Americans have skipped or delayed care because of cost. About 30 million people are uninsured. Another 100 million are underinsured. Two‑thirds of personal bankruptcies in the United States are tied to medical bills.
Most people don't actually start with a doctor. They start with a search bar. WebMD, Reddit, TikTok, an LLM, a friend in nursing school — the front door of healthcare in America is, in practice, a Google search at 11 p.m. with a sick child. We pretend this isn't the system. It is the system.
We have built the most expensive healthcare in the world and routed everyone to a search engine to interpret it.
Diagnosis. Where it fails.
Healthcare in this country fails on three axes that compound on each other. We are building Laymen against them, in order.
1. Accessibility.
Even fully insured Americans cannot get a clinician on the phone for a basic question. The triage path is: portal message, two‑day wait, ambiguous reply, schedule a visit. For anyone uninsured, underinsured, in a primary‑care desert, or simply working a 9–5, the path collapses entirely. Information that should be a thirty‑second answer becomes a three‑week project, or never happens.
The deeper failure underneath is an expertise wall. The science of medicine is largely public — PubMed, MedlinePlus, USPSTF, NLM Bookshelf — but the synthesis isn't. Reading a guideline isn't the same as understanding it. The wall keeps people out, not because the information is private, but because the translation is gated.
2. Affordability.
We built a system in which the person receiving care is rarely the one paying for it directly. The result is a third‑party payer market with predictable distortions — opaque pricing, no real consumer signal on quality, perverse incentives for over‑treatment, and bills that arrive months later for care you can no longer evaluate.
When you don't pay, you don't choose. When you don't choose, the providers stop competing on what you would actually pay for. Quality and price both drift away from you. Every other consumer category we know works because the buyer and the user are the same person. Healthcare is the largest exception in American life, and it is not a coincidence that it is the worst‑performing one.
3. Personalization.
Modern medicine is, statistically, designed for an average that no patient is. Reference ranges are drawn from population means. Drug dosing is a coarse averaging across metabolizer phenotypes. Screening guidelines are written for cohorts. Your specific body — your wearable patterns, your labs over time, your pharmacogenetic alleles, your family history — is invisible inside a 17‑minute visit.
The data to do better already exists. Your phone, watch, ring, scale, and last lab panel hold more about your biology than any clinic that sees you twice a year ever will. The bottleneck isn't collection. It's synthesis — and someone, or something, paying attention longitudinally.
Inaccessible. Unaffordable. Impersonal. Three failures, one system.
Prognosis. What we're building.
Laymen is the answer to that diagnosis, in three layers, with one through‑line: information should not be guarded — by paywalls, by expertise walls, or by bureaucracy. We're building the clearest health surface on Earth, and we're giving the front door away.
Layer 01 — Terms. Free, forever.
Terms is the plain‑English chat that should have replaced WebMD a decade ago. Cited, calibrated, escalation‑specific — and free for anyone, anywhere, with a question. This is the front door of healthcare we are kicking open. Not behind insurance. Not behind a clinic visit. Not behind expertise. Just the answer.
Layer 02 — Baseline. A private health layer for each user.
Baseline is the affordability layer — and the personalization one. Five rooms (Today, Changes, Plan, Vault, Ask) around one clear view of where you stand. Under the hood, the same reasoning system that powers Terms runs against your own demographics, wearables, optional logs, and labs — for that user only, getting more accurate the longer it runs. We bypass the third‑party‑payer trap by selling directly: no insurance, $20 a month. When you pay, you stay invested in the outcome. When the buyer is the user, quality has somewhere to compete.
Layer 03 — Genome. The lifelong foundation.
Genome reads your whole sequence once, at thirty‑times depth, in a CLIA/CAP‑accredited lab — and feeds it permanently into your Baseline fine‑tune. Pharmacogenomics, polygenic risk, monogenic high‑penetrance findings, all reinterpreted every month as the science publishes. This is the layer that turns reactive sick‑care into proactive prevention: knowing what is coming, decades in advance, and changing behavior to keep it from happening.
Reactive medicine waits for you to get sick. Proactive medicine notices the drift and does something about it.
Why no insurance.
We don't take it. Not now, not later. The current system is broken specifically because it severed the buyer from the user. We're reconnecting them. You pay, you choose, you care about the outcome — so the product has to. In return, we charge a price that is meaningfully cheaper than a single specialist visit per year, and we keep it that way.
Where this ends.
We start by replacing the Google search at 11 p.m. We add a private Baseline shaped by your own data. We add a lifelong genomic foundation underneath both. From there, the work is longevity — interventions that come from your own data, lifelong, and eventually genetic engineering that supercharges what the original sequence gave you.
This is the destruction of a healthcare system that no longer serves the people inside it, and the construction of one that does — quiet, private, lifelong, and aimed at life without limits.
The job in front of us is large. The job behind us, larger.
We're going.