Switching Hospital Systems to Linux

jcatcw writes "Health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies is focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices. The cure is moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux, which can then be used on less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes. A deal with Red Hat allows McKesson to offer its software in a top-to-bottom package for mission-critical hospital IT systems."

Comments

Re:Affordable health care

[smooth wombat]

and they'd give me an X-ray and cast for "free".

I'm glad you put free in quotes because quite obviously your x-ray and cast were not free. You, and the millions of your countryfolk, paid for those things from the higher tax rates you pay.

In other words, you're living a true socialist dream by having someone else subsidize or pay for your medical bills. Redistribution of wealth and all that.

But let's turn it around. Let us say for the sake of argument that from the age of five until the age of 70, you never needed medical care. You never broke anything, never had any serious illness, etc. Now, based on those 65 years of healthy bliss, do you think it is fair that you paid what probably amounted to well over $250K in taxes to subsidize someone else? In other words, you paid for something but got no benefit from your spent money.

I know people like to think that socialized medicine is a panacea but I don't like the idea of being forced to pay for something and not getting something in return. By the same token, I don't think paying huge premiums for medical insurance and then having the insurance company tell me they won't cover me for X procedure unless I cough up more money is the way to go either. Either you're going to cover me or you're not. That's why I'm paying you the premiums.

To see how really screwed up medical insurance coverage can be, read this story from MarketWatch.