Ther­a­nos — the blood-test­ing start­up that in 2014 hit a $10 bil­lion val­u­a­tion on its promise to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the health­care sys­tem as we know it — has final­ly com­plet­ed its long fall from grace. As report­ed ear­li­er this month by John Car­rey­rou in the Wall Street Jour­nal, the so-called ​“uni­corn” firm is final­ly set to dissolve.

The real way to revolutionize our highly privatized healthcare sector is through decommodification, nationalization and redistribution across the industry.

The company’s founder Eliz­a­beth Holmes raised hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars from investors enchant­ed by her pitch, honed over years of pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tions, keynotes and busi­ness meet­ings. Unlike tra­di­tion­al diag­nos­tic blood test­ing, her company’s device required nei­ther doc­tors’ orders nor nee­dles — it could turn around accu­rate results based on a few drops of blood. As she put it in her 2014 TED Talk, ​“Imag­ine a world in which con­sumers were empow­ered to take any blood test, when­ev­er they want­ed, allow­ing them to access to cru­cial infor­ma­tion at the moment it real­ly mat­ters.” Holmes’ vision was a con­vinc­ing one: In 2014, the then 30-year-old helm­ing the Valley’s hottest biotech start­up was called ​“the next Steve Jobs” — a com­par­i­son she may have striv­en to evoke with her clos­et­ful of black turtlenecks.

What hap­pened next is laid out in exquis­ite detail in Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Sil­i­con Val­ley Start­up, Carreyrou’s new book about the saga. Ther­a­nos’ pro­pri­etary tech turned out to be error-prone junk, a fact the com­pa­ny seemed to spend more resources lying about and lit­i­gat­ing over than actu­al­ly try­ing to fix. Once Car­rey­rou exposed the fraud, Ther­a­nos began a free-fall that today seems near­ly com­plete: Its val­u­a­tion has bot­tomed out, cor­po­rate part­ners and investors have been left in the cold and what’s left of the com­pa­ny is fac­ing heavy cen­sure by fed­er­al reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies. Mean­while, Holmes and her co-execs face pos­si­ble crim­i­nal charges.

Bad Blood offers a cau­tion­ary fable warn­ing against huck­sters all-too-eager to feign the sort of genius capa­ble of bust­ing cul­tur­al par­a­digms to trans­form soci­ety as we know it.

But for all its insight into the ​“fake it ​’til you make it” cul­ture of Big Tech’s gold rush, Bad Blood leaves out the same crit­i­cal point that’s missed in most main­stream media dis­course about Sil­i­con Valley’s race to ​“dis­rupt” the health­care sec­tor: It will nev­er, ever hap­pen, and human his­to­ry offers us no rea­son to believe that it will. These com­pa­nies’ busi­ness mod­els mon­e­tize the fail­ures of our sys­tem, and there­fore have a vest­ed inter­est in for­ti­fy­ing the struc­tur­al bar­ri­ers to the uni­ver­sal and equi­table dis­tri­b­u­tion of care.

That the U.S. health­care sys­tem is mas­sive, unwieldy, and uni­ver­sal­ly dis­liked imbues it with just the kind of ​“fric­tion” tech evan­ge­lists anoint them­selves to solve. And with health­care spend­ing top­ping $3 tril­lion annu­al­ly, the prize they stand to win is obvi­ous. But the things that make the sys­tem so hor­rif­ic are not things the tech indus­try — with its insa­tiable dri­ve for prof­it — is capa­ble of chang­ing. Our sys­tem doesn’t lack ​“inno­va­tion,” it lacks coher­ent, equi­table pub­lic stew­ard­ship — the com­mon fea­ture of uni­ver­sal health­care sys­tems. Sil­i­con Valley’s ​“dis­rup­tions” can only amount to changes that, in the inter­est of mar­ket via­bil­i­ty, depend on and repli­cate the same struc­tures that make health­care in Amer­i­ca so mis­er­able in the first place.

If you don’t believe me, take it from the would-be dis­rup­tor her­self. Sys­temic short­com­ings were baked into Holmes’ busi­ness mod­el. As Bad Blood relays, Ther­a­nos zeroed in on Ari­zona for its ill-fat­ed roll­out into Wal­greens stores not only because of the state’s loose reg­u­la­to­ry régime, but because of the high num­ber of unin­sured res­i­dents. The log­ic was that peo­ple with­out health­care cov­er­age would be enticed by the oppor­tu­ni­ty to bypass doc­tors to mon­i­tor their own health on the cheap. Such a deci­sion begs the ques­tion: What were these patients sup­posed to do with their diag­no­sis once they had it? An actu­al office vis­it and diag­nos­tic blood work are more expen­sive than they should be, but bare­ly make a dent in the over­all cost of being sick in America.

For the unin­sured — a pool of peo­ple with­out the mon­ey for insur­ance pre­mi­ums, let alone treat­ment — Ther­a­nos wouldn’t be dis­rup­tive, but, more like­ly, preda­to­ry. Even dia­betes, Holmes’ go-to exam­ple of a con­di­tion that could be reversed if patients knew they had it, befalls the poor dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly not because they fail to proac­tive­ly mon­i­tor their health through blood test­ing, but large­ly because the lifestyle changes that com­bat the dis­ease demand time and mon­ey the likes of which the poor are less like­ly to have.

And yet the fall of Ther­a­nos has hard­ly cleared the field of aspir­ing health­care dis­rupters, many of whom rack up fawn­ing press cov­er­age and mil­lions in fund­ing. Last month, Google’s par­ent com­pa­ny Alpha­bet sunk $375 mil­lion into Oscar Health, an insur­ance start­up that has debuted such inno­va­tions as nar­row provider net­works, a strat­i­fied claims pro­cess­ing sys­tem and an advanced app. It seems as though angling to become a slight­ly-bet­ter-run for-prof­it insur­er holds neg­li­gi­ble dis­rup­tive poten­tial — insur­ance com­pa­nies aren’t abysmal because they’re inef­fi­cient dinosaurs; they’re abysmal because their busi­ness mod­el is at odds with their pur­port­ed sole func­tion: pay­ing patients’ stag­ger­ing health­care costs.

Insur­ers are explic­it­ly incen­tivized to avoid pay­ing for pol­i­cy­hold­ers’ care, which is why they hire so many admin­is­tra­tors to pore over claims in search of tech­ni­cal­i­ties on which to deny them. That’s an inher­ent ten­sion no app can fix, not even one that promis­es the ease and trans­paren­cy that Oscar Health’s does. Just as Ther­a­nos framed pre­ventable deaths as indi­vid­ual fail­ures of dili­gence, so too does Oscar frame sur­prise patient bills as fail­ures of research.

Oth­er entrants from the tech world striv­ing to make the health­care expe­ri­ence smoother are sim­i­lar­ly con­strained by faulty frame­works. Uber’s intro­duc­tion of Uber Health promised to shut­tle patients to appoint­ments and strat­i­fy the piece­meal non-emer­gency med­ical trans­porta­tion indus­try, a $3 bil­lion drop in the buck­et com­pared to what the com­pa­ny stands to save in employ­er-spon­sored insur­ance costs by clas­si­fy­ing its work­ers as inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors. Over­hyped tele­health star­tups’ like Snap­MD and MD LIVE’s entire exis­tence is premised on mak­ing sure in-per­son doc­tors’ vis­its are both expen­sive and inac­ces­si­ble. Efforts to over­haul elec­tron­ic med­ical records have been stalled by the lack of any prof­it incen­tive to share data across providers and risk los­ing lucra­tive patients. Not only are these play­ers doing noth­ing to com­bat the struc­ture of the U.S. health­care sys­tem, but their share­hold­ers are active­ly prof­it­ing off of its shortcomings.

Inge­nu­ity isn’t what our health­care sec­tor needs. We have plen­ty of it already, and it hasn’t man­aged to stop poor peo­ple from dying over 10 years ear­li­er, on aver­age, than their wealthy peers. Mate­r­i­al con­di­tions have a far more dra­mat­ic impact on pop­u­la­tion-based health than do the indi­vid­u­al­ized cut­ting edge inter­ven­tions that attract ven­ture cap­i­tal. So it’s iron­ic that Car­rey­rou frames Ther­a­nos’ fraud­u­lent inven­tion as some­how ​“too good to be true,” when the thing that was actu­al­ly too good to be true was a health­care sys­tem that could be democ­ra­tized with a sin­gle tech­no­crat­ic tweak. That would be a far eas­i­er prob­lem to solve.

The real way to rev­o­lu­tion­ize our high­ly pri­va­tized health­care sec­tor is through decom­mod­i­fi­ca­tion, nation­al­iza­tion and redis­tri­b­u­tion across the indus­try. Any pro­duc­tive solu­tion to a gross­ly unequal, prof­it-hun­gry health­care sys­tem can­not also make share­hold­ers rich. The notion that those two things could ever be com­pat­i­ble is how we got here in the first place.