With 'Obamacare' Kicking In, Microsoft Sees a Health-Data Windfall

curtwoodward writes "Now that President Obama's federal health care reform is past its major political hurdles — and with renewed focus on out-of-control costs in healthcare — companies that sell 'big data' software are licking their chops. The reason: Healthcare has huge piles of information that is being used in new ways, to track patient admissions, spending, and much more. From hospitals to insurance companies, they'll all need new ways of crunching those numbers. It's basically an entirely new field that will dwarf the spending growth in traditional data-heavy industries like finance, retail and marketing, a Microsoft regional sales GM says."

Comments

Central planning

[udachny]

Central planning, destruction of competition, government money (taxed, borrowed, printed, whatever), more 'data crunching'.

The costs are going up, the people who used to have health insurance (whether paid for it themselves or through their employer) will be falling while the number of people who never had health insurance but can now have it because it will be heavily subsidized for them will be going up.

The nonsensical SCOTUS decision on ACA (4 vs 5 makes something Constitutional as opposed to unconstitutional?) is only technically 'constitutional' because the fine for not buying insurance is seen as a tax, but as such, it cannot be too high (whatever that means), otherwise it means the Congress is legislating by taxing, and that's illegal. Of-course ACA is unconstitutional, because it is a direct tax, the fact that some people will not pay it does not turn it into indirect tax. There are plenty of people who are not paying federal income taxes, yet that does not make them indirect. (Here I cover all these arguments and more).

But Americans were sold a bill of goods, the health care COSTS will be going up, as there will be even more demand generated than just with gov't money in Medicare, fake demand that would not have existed otherwise with fake money, that nobody that would spend it had to earn.

The costs will be going up, the insurance companies will see a drastic fall in subscribers, their revenues will disappear, and the gov't will have to either bail out the insurance companies or the next bill will completely nationalize health insurance and turn it into 'single payer', which is even more devastating than that USA used to have prior to ACA.

Of-course there is no money for any of it, this is another giant step towards destruction of the American economy, and people are still wondering, 'why are investors not investing in America?'

USSR used to have a 'free for all' health care and education and even 'right to work' (where you'll get a job, regardless whether you want it or not, otherwise you could even face jail time for being a 'parasite') American CIA even believe until the last day of USSR that the former Soviet state was strong. Yeah, well, the same people (or the same attitudes and misconceptions) that worked for the CIA at the time are at work today, believing that what USA needs is more socialism and not less of it.

USA is bankrupt, ACA doesn't matter anymore, the US economy cannot afford it but it doesn't even have to, it won't matter much to the final outcome.