Technology = Friend Not Enemy

In my opinion, quality health care is simply the ability to fix whatever healthcare problems arise within both an individual person and in a population and the ability to prevent those problems from occurring. Unfortunately, we are at the point where the U.S. is simply wasting money on unnecessary technological advances with very little return on the investment. At this point, it’s the economic problem of diminishing returns.

The situation reminded me of a quote used by Obadiah Stane in Iron Man to describe the lack of technology in the Middle East, “Technology has always been the Achilles heel in this region.” The only problem is that we are the exact opposite; as a society, we are always obsessed with the fastest, loudest and biggest technologies, regardless if they are medical or electrical. Consequently, we are always willing to pay top dollar for that tiniest fraction of improvement just so we can say we have the best or are better than our neighbor.

This train of thought is costing the country billions of dollars wasted unnecessarily. There needs to be a regulation system put in to place whether by the government, providers or insurance companies to control the excessive use of some technologies. In addition, we need to learn to embrace technology, similar to what Taiwan and Japan did, with the usage of smart cards to carry information and computers to control claims and billing. Through this, we can significantly cut administrative costs like those two countries did.

Unfortunately, in order to make the changes needed to save money, we are going to need to pay sacrifices through both cutting our health care expenditures and paying extra for the set up of new technologies. I’m not sure how many people are willing to make those sacrifices yet.