Andy Kessler

Technology Review: A Pound of Cure

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22852

The federal government is about to spend big on health-care IT. Too bad the medical industry has a vested interest in inefficiency.

Technology is once again being touted as a cure-all, this time for what ails the American health-care industry. The Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus plan includes $19 billion for health-care IT spending that provides incentives for doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records. Starting in 2011, stimulus funds will provide additional Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for health-care providers using such systems.

These federal funding programs assume that the critical hurdle to widespread adoption of electronic medical records is cost. Indeed, hospitals surveyed in a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported cost as the major barrier. Yet compared with other businesses, the health-care industry has been unmoved by the logic of lowering costs to increase profits. The truth is that these folks could have digitized the whole industry ages ago. The technology has been around for a long time: Wall Street began phasing out physical stock certificates over 35 years ago. Even the cash-strapped airline industry has gone ticketless, removing huge labor and overhead costs. These industries started using electronic records because they believed it would save money. The health-care industry simply has not followed suit.

The reason lies neither with cost nor with inadequate technology. Rather, the health-care industry's reluctance to digitize its records is rooted in a desire to keep medicine's lucrative business model hidden. Dangling $19 billion in front of a $2.4 trillion industry is not nearly enough to get it to reveal the financial secrets that electronic health records are likely to uncover--and upon which its huge profits depend. In those medical records lie the ugly truth about the business of medicine: sickness is profitable. The greater the number of treatments, procedures, and hospital stays, the larger the profit. There is little incentive for doctors and hospitals to identify or reduce wasteful spending in medicine.

Forbes.com - The Inevitability Of Internet Pirates

Pirates are all over the news this year. They were off the coast of Somalia … and now they're in Sweden? In April, a Stockholm court handed down a guilty verdict for "accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law" to the four owners of the Web site Pirate Bay, who now each face up to one year in prison.

Their crime? Setting up a site that allows 22 million users--and that number is growing--to search for and find pointers to (mostly) copyrighted material on the Internet. These so-called torrents are easily downloadable, perfect digital copies of music, TV shows, movies and, as it's known on the Web, pr0n. Outraged at their courts, Swedish citizens got the last laugh when the three-year-old Pirate Party received 7.1% of the vote in the early June European Union elections, guaranteeing it a seat in the European Parliament. Argh.

The funny thing is, Pirate Bay doesn't even host any copyrighted material for download, only directions to find it. If I were Google CEO Eric Schmidt, I'd hold off on that trip to Europe this summer. Because type "The Climb lyrics" into Google and you get pages of links to other Web sites with copyrighted lyrics to this Miley Cyrus song. Type in "Hannah Montana the Movie torrent," and you have a choice of download sites for a copy of the movie, all one click away. That's "accessory and conspiracy," if you ask me.

Fortunately, we in the U.S. rarely pay attention to Swedish laws. Did you know it's illegal in Sweden to repaint a house without a license and the government's permission? But along the lines of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remark--"Why shouldn't we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article written by a professor?"--I say bring on the Pirate Party!