The health care debate continues to rage. Whether you call it Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, or TrumpCare, the current proposals in Congress to change it all claim to provide affordable access to health care for Americans. Extreme Tech brought this interesting topic to us in their article, “How IT Can Save Our Healthcare System.”
This isn’t a post advocating for one plan or the other. The big problem with affordability in health care is the industry has not markedly changed the way it delivers services. The United States spends over $9,000 per capita on healthcare, more than twice as much as other advanced countries like the UK and Japan, each of which spend under $4,000 per capita. These higher costs do not deliver any significant increase in life expectancy compared to other developed countries. Yet the United States spends more on technology.
The system that delivers health care can often lead to imperfect, expensive, and frustrating health outcomes. Digital technology is driving rapid change in everything from media to retail to automobiles. Health care is no different. The future reality may be that health insurance continues to provide less coverage at ever-higher cost, forcing consumers to seek out alternative care solutions that they can actually afford to pay for out-of-pocket.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
