Hits and Misses
Mount Sinai hospital offers iPads to patients to track their stay.
41 percent of U.S. households now own mobile phones only.
Can innovation solve VA waiting list woes? Telemedicine cuts hospital admissions 35 percent.
Smartphone app diagnoses adrenal gland diseases.
Will it ever stop growing? Medicaid added another one million dependents in May.
“Will it ever stop growing? Medicaid added another one million dependents in May.”
The monster that is Medicaid, it will never stop growing and never be satisfied until we are all on Medicaid.
“Mount Sinai hospital offers iPads to patients to track their stay.”
This seems like a great way to keep patients informed throughout their stay at the hospital. Instead of never knowing how their progress is going, this keeps them informed and alert.
Personally, I am surprised that more than 41% are sole owners of mobile phones. I feel there is little incentive to not cut the cord in this day and age. Unless they are the baby boomers who are reluctant to change.
Yes, the expansion of Medicaid is unfortunately unavoidable, and the progressives love more and more people becoming dependent on government-funded healthcare.
So with 66 million on Medicaid and 52 million on Medicare, that means 37% of the US population of 317 million get their healthcare from the government. And it’s only gonna get worse as baby boomers slide into retirement age and more illegal immigrants qualify for govt healthcare. In another decade we’ll probably have half the population on some form of govt healthcare. How are we taxpayers going to pay for that!?
Big Truck Joe, we are all going to have to pay for that somehow. In order to fund this massive redistribution scheme, the government will take more and more from the most productive in order to subsidize those who will not produce, and this death spiral has already begun and is now kicking into high gear.
Until there is no money left, and no productive individuals left to contribute.
For once, the VA is in the news about something good…and it’s regarding what we have always known to be true: innovation is what drives progress! It always does, and no amount of redistribution can ever even approach what innovation has done for the American way of life.
Socialism tries to spread the wealth, capitalism grows wealth.
One of the reasons we don’t see more cool innovations like telemedicine in practice now is that doctors have no incentive to offer such an option primarily because they know that they will not be reimbursed by the insurance companies for doing so. If they did, more doctors would do it, and this would improve wait times and reduce costs. However, since they currently do not, this is another way in which insurance raises the overall costs of healthcare.
Smartphone app diagnoses… diseases.
I remember back in the early 1990s when cars were getting more complicated. Every new car had a computer that controlled the fuel injector, the timing and other factors. We were told that the small, independent mechanic shops were going away because the computerized diagnostic systems were too expensive for the average small mechanic to buy. I remember hearing how a computer to diagnose engine problems costs “$50,000” — too expensive for a small shop. Oddly enough, 20 years later cars are even more expensive and I recently bought a OBD II portable car computer for $100.
The article about the smartphone diagnostic tool reminds me of the scene from the movie Idiocracy. A medical attendant gives the patient three identical-looking metal probes and tells him to put one in his mouth, one in his ear and one (elsewhere). The machine returns an error code and the attendant yanks back the probes and tell the patient he inserted the probes in the wrong orifice and to reinsert them correctly. (the medical attendant doesn’t bother to clean the probes before demanding the patient “reinsert them correctly.”