[nwah1]

This speaks about standardizing contracts but neglects to mention that the competing proprietary electronic medical record standards also add cost, complexity, and increase medical errors.

And there are still about 14 other layers of the healthcare onion to peel.

Medical talent is kept artificially scarce thanks to the lobbying and control of licensing by the AMA. We should hand control of licensing over to the AARP and the March of Dimes instead.

Hospitals and insurance have perverse incentives because they are separate. But when insurance and provisioning is combined as with Kaiser Permanente, then incentives are aligned and bureaucracy can be streamlined.

Hospital consortiums currently carve up monopolies within a given piece of turf. We should break that up, and allow a proliferation of low-cost community clinics for less advanced procedures.

And this hasnt even covered obscene pharmaceutical costs, electronic medical device manufacturers, the diagnostic industry oligopoly, and so on.

[nunie123]

I started a project last week requiring me to learn the proprietary EDI file format that CMS mandates. I was surprised to learn that in order to exchange healthcare data with our government we have to use a file format owned by a private entity. And of course you have to pay to get access to the full implementation documentation.