The Googlization of Everything

Doug K explains:

... The real question is how to arrive at a health-care system that doesn't punish the sick. The answer is technically simple but politically difficult. It starts with acknowledging that health care isn't a market. More accurately, it is a market, but the good being traded is healthy individuals, not health care itself. Senator Edward's health-care proposal (or Sen. Clinton's, as it's much the same thing) is a good first step. Once we have a system where we need not fear the database, we can proceed to establish evidence-based medicine.

Until that time, I will fervently oppose all attempts to establish a database of medical records. The incentives in our current system are so perverse, that the database will be very dangerous to our health.

A secondary issue is one of simple data gathering. According to the optimistic hurrahs of Microsoft,
"People want to be able to collect, and securely store, and share their private health care information which is today scattered all over the place, with doctor A and doctor B and hospital C, and wherever they were born."
Lovely. How do they propose to extract that information from doctors and hospitals ? For them, that data is part of their competitive advantage. Whenever I get tests or procedures done (and I've had a lot recently) the results are kept secret from me: sent only to my doctor and doubtless a variety of financially interested parties, insurance companies, and so on. On a few occasions kindly nurses or technicians have actually shared the information with me, but that's the exception. For the most part an inquiry as to obtaining the technical details is treated with a kind of amazed wondering contempt by the administrative staff....

I could not agree more. But we are still stuck with a political dilemma. We are not getting single-payer health care in the United States (which means, of course, that about a fifth of all Americans are not getting health care any time soon and the rest of us get crappy health care at the highest possible prices). That's the sad truth.

Additionally, we are unlikely to get a Clinton/Edwards version of expensive universality any time soon.

And, we are unlikely to stifle Microsoft's, Google's, and the Cleveland Clinic's efforts to create digital health databases.

So what are our political option? Do we refuse to intervene to push for necessary regulations on what Google and Microsoft are doing in hopes that further disasters generate the widespread political will for single-payer health care? Do we sacrifice the health and security of millions for the possibility of a better system someday?

This is one of the classic conundrums of incremental liberalism. There is no easy answer.