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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (6231)	3/3/2009 2:46:21 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

Mary, there are costs and benefits to everything. None of us is in a position to weigh them against each other. We just don't know enough. But you are just looking at the benefits and ignoring the costs. The benefits may not outweigh the costs. An example. I was just doing some clean-up on my computer so fresh in my mind is the notion when I first got a home computer a decade and a half ago that I would set up systems for this and that, one of them being a catalog of my music collection. It was a lot of work keying it all in that first time. Over time I transferred it from my old computer to each new one but have never accessed the data base. I didn't keep it up because I would buy a CD but never sit down to input it so the data base is not current. Not to mention that I buy most of my music electronically now. The couple of times I wanted to check on something, I went back to the drawer and fished through the jewel boxes. It wasn't cost effective to build that catalog although it seemed like a good idea at the time. How many times would anyone look back through doctors' notes, even if they could read them? And how much work would it be for the doctor to input them? And would what you found be accurate and useful? If you had the doctor input text rather than codes, it wouldn't be as costly as coding, but then you wouldn't be able to aggregate your results. So you have to consider how important the aggregation would be and how accurate the coding might be. If you don't trust the coding, you'd still have to go back and read the text. You have to weigh the benefit against the considerable costs. And doctors' notation is just one small piece of the system. There's also the history factor, something even seasoned designers tend to forget about. All our records to date are on paper. Do we pay to go back and input them so we will have a complete electronic record. If we don't we still have to either do without the records or go back to the paper files and we have stuff in two places. Is that cost effective for someone old enough to be in Medicare? Now, if we start doing it for babies, in half a century we'd be all electronic. But in the meantime, we have half a loaf and half is not necessarily better than none. Having read your comments on this topic it is clear that you don't have a clue about the enormity, complexity, and difficulty of building systems. Programming is the least of it.