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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."
Is the absolute worst fucking buzzword out there right now. It is a great way to figure out someone is a complete idiot right off the bat.
4) Pay for step 2
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
What big health care data? I'm not joking when I saw that the last place I would ever trust sensitive or critical information is a hospital. Hospitals have the least amount of data production and verification imaginable, I would be very skeptical about tracking data from any healthcare system because frankly it will always be incorrect.
Over the last 10 years I've had MANY MANY files that have gone missing, been lost, been misplaced and just plan gone from the health care system. In one case after losing the same MRI test three times they also lost the paper copies! Now I don't know a lot of industries that can lose the same work multiple times in both digital and non digital form.
Clearly I'm left with a very different out look on the health care system and data management and security, So as for collecting big data, that just wont work, that data isn't secure enough inside the system to account for anything. It would be like running a survey of 10,000 people where you only return 7,000 surveys, the data will never work because your missing to much important data.
You'll lobby the government to update everything to metro and get a big nice juicy contract.
US system is FUBAR, 50million uninsured, huge numbers of medical induced bankruptcies (for the heinous crime of being unlucky), lower life expectancy.
Nationalised single payer with optional extra private coverage is demonstrably cheaper and has (on average) better outcomes. Anyone with half a brain would get behind establishing it in the US. Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
What does an insurance company have to do with it?
Something along these lines:
1) pay $x to insurance company
2) feel ill
3) go to doctor
4) have insurance company pay $x*20 to doctor
5) get better
It's an actuarial calculation. The sum of everyone paying to the insurance company must be more than the sum of what doctors are charging from the insurance company. So, the insurance company searches for ways to widen the difference as much as possible all the while staying competitive with the other insurance companies.
The problem with the US system is that you don't have laws stating that that insurance companies cannot deny pre-existing conditions, must provide treatment for basically everything, and cannot charge differently due to you being a high-demanding customer, only being allowed to increase prices due to age and even so within pre-defined limits. If such laws existed insurance premiums would be calculated in a way as to make it all work by simply charging the huge number of younger and healthier customers slightly more. It's how it works here in Brazil. You get private insurance, you get treatment for almost everything. Insurance companies here compete only in terms of time from diagnostic to procedure (the faster it is the more you pay, with the government determining a maximum limit), the list of hospitals you get access to (the fancier and most renowned ones cost more) and niceties (private vs. multiple patient room, free choice of doctor vs. pre-approved ones, automatic access to expensive exams vs. pre-screened and subject to authorization, private ambulance/air-transport/etc. included or not, coverage area, discounts on medications etc.), but not in what they cover or for whom. Oh, and insurance companies must compete with the government provided free health coverage, which is admittedly bad to the extreme but in being free imposes a maximum limit on private insurance's premiums before people think paying isn't worth it anymore.
When these impositions were made lots of insurance companies couldn't adapt and went bankrupt. Then the surviving ones wen't into merges and reorganizations. Nowadays the ones that remain in business are doing fine even with the government continually expanding the list of procedures they must cover and materials they must provide.
It works.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
UK Economy: $2.4 trillion
UK Heath expenditure: under $200 billion.
That's 1/12th of the economy, sounds like you overspend on your health system. Shouldn't the competition keep prices down?
i work at a major medical research institution. A few years ago, our CIO showed us a graph of data they'd gone through showing a large spike in heart attacks in otherwise healthy men. The spike then dropped a few years later. Normally someone wouldn't be looking at this data, so it wasn't until after the spike was gone that this was investigated. Turned out that Vioxx had been put on the market about a year before the spike started, and was pulled off the market about 6 months or so before the spike dropped off.
Getting massive amounts of data (anonymized of course) can show trends in public health that can give us a lot of information and save lives and money.
(and yes, I hate the term 'big data'. No sense of scale of how big it is.)
There are lots of other government transfer programs that tax the young to pay for the old. It only "works" until the demographic shift inherent to an aging population gets bad enough that there aren't enough young people paying taxes to support the old people. Then you either move the age to qualify for benefits up or you run up massive deficits.
Is the absolute worst fucking buzzword out there right now
The worst buzzword out there is, without a doubt, "Obamacare". This clusterfuck of an industry bailout bill has pretty well no resemblance to health care reform, or to any of what Obama actually wanted to do.
It is a great way to figure out someone is a complete idiot right off the bat.
br? That is also true about people who use the word "Obamacare".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That's why I pay taxes.
Well, then that government is your insurer. At least, when it's not throwing that money at other things.
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
UK Economy: $2.4 trillion
UK Heath expenditure: under $200 billion.
That's 1/12th of the economy, sounds like you overspend on your health system. Shouldn't the competition keep prices down?
First, US government involvement has historically lead to anything but keeping prices down.
Second, since most US health care is through private insurance and through private transactions, the US population basically spends that much on health care for the simple reason they want to.
Third, Obamacare is fundamentally dysfunctional. It's two main goals of greater health care coverage and lower cost are diametrically opposed. It's pretty damn impossible to increase demand without increasing cost. Of course, giving everyone "coverage" and then rationing health care would do that. Hmmm, would the same cynical demagogue who railed against the Patriot Act as a candidate but then went well beyond anything in that Act to actually conduct "extrajudicial killing" of US citizens once elected to President, hmmm, would a person who could do THAT really care what the actual results would be as long as he could claim some great accomplishment that would make his useful idiot constituency happy?
Hospitals aren't buying into software because of "Obamacare" (or the Affordable Care Act, if brevity isn't your thing). Hospitals are buying into software because of the HITECH act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). They're getting more Medicare reimbursement for showing meaningful use of their software, so that's the trigger, not the ACA.
If you want "big data" you think IBM, you don't think Microsoft.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What you are saying happens on both sides, but disagreeing with the effectiveness of a single payer health care system is about as pants-on-head retarded as it gets. There is so much proof for its greater effectiveness WITH lesser costs that arguing against it is... frankly clinging to an ideology thats been totally disproven in multiple countries by multiple different types of government, presiding over multiple different cultures.
All it boils down to is "We can't do that becuz thats the cumminists. If we do that they win!"
Additionally conservative media in the U.S. can't even back up its crazy lines anymore without generating extremely biased(or in some cases completely fabricated) studies. Its gone beyond the point of retardation to the point where it seems like the conservative movement in the U.S. is actually trying to do as much DAMAGE as possible to the U.S.
Reality check: Cold war is over. Both sides lost. Get over it. Merits to be found in both forms of government. Take the best of both sides and be happier.
Hopefully at some point our country peacefully separates into two (or more) new countries so that the sensible and logical people can have single payer health care and the others can yell at each other about pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.
You can always move to Canada or England if you think they are so much better
That is a very common statement, but why do I need to leave? Why can't I help change the system and then other people can leave? Why are you the one who deserves to stay?
On top of that, the people who say things like "why don't you just go leave and live in Canada or the UK" often have no idea how difficult it is to do that. I am a highly qualified worker but I need a job offer in one of those countries in order to move there - I can't just show up and declare myself to be living there. Conversely, the conservative free-market havens like Somalia and Afghanistan tend to require almost nothing in order to live there, so why don't you leave instead?
It always amazes me that liberals complain that conservatives want to run their life
Well considering how the conservatives in government are constantly impeding on my ability to live my life, I would say they are indeed telling me how to run my life.
it is the liberals who are demanding that everyone follows their rules
Single payer health care does not demand you follow any new rules. If every other industrialized country in the world is any example, it would actually result in you keeping more of your earned income than what you currently keep - and it will still allow you to die from preventable ailments if you choose to do so.
And when you don't agree with the liberal it goes right to name calling.
Considering they way you are already throwing around unsubstantiated assumptions I would say you have already gone to name calling.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Bullshit.
They only appear diametrically opposed if you're a moron. The reality is that people will be forced to pay into the system if they have the money rather than waiting until they get sick to get insurance so they'll at least be contributing something rather than being overwhelmed by bills and declaring bankruptcy. What's more, we're already starting to see checks mailed out to people whose health insurer charged too much for premiums. My insurer was pretty good at estimating the real costs so my check was pretty small. But for other people the checks were a lot larger.
Obamacare also mandates that insurance companies pay for preventative care, you know the care that prevents serious and expensive conditions from occurring or at least reduces the likelihood of such conditions occurring. The US pays a crap load of money for preventable diseases to people who haven't been able to afford coverage and have to wait until they have a serious illness before seeking help or worry about whether or not their trip to the hospital for a possible heart attack is going to be covered.
As far as the historical, that's not the government that's because morons like you vote for corporatists with no interest in keeping costs down if it means corporate interests and the rich suffer. Every other country that's gone with universal healthcare has lower costs than we do, if we screw that up, you can blame the GOP for corporate welfare.
In my case, I didn't even talk about the major advantages like the complex analysis. 100 billion row joins don't sell execs. I did it purely based on the cost vs. enterprise grade storage. That got it in the door - and then I was selling the platform to developers. Showing a dev team a little pig script written on the spot, then sending it out on a production cluster and watching it use 800 cores and 8TB of memory, processing a few dozen TB of data while we're sitting in a room, and the devs got on board. Now I've got new dev groups wanting onto the platform regularly - and the execs keep hearing about how this hadoop thing is a critical part of their app/service/report. It sells itself, after a point.
.
The problem with the US system is that you don't have laws stating that that insurance companies cannot deny pre-existing conditions, must provide treatment for basically everything, and cannot charge differently due to you being a high-demanding customer, only being allowed to increase prices due to age and even so within pre-defined limits.
what you describe here is not insurance but a payment scheme managed by 3rd party. Insurance is about the management of highly unlikely events. Covering someone who is 100% certain to generate costs has nothing to do with risk management, it's a money losing position. Risk management would be: 5% chance of costing X => premium is roughly 5% of X. The price discrimination against cost centers is what makes insurance work. With coverage of 100% certain cases you have only offloading cost on someone else, who would see his premium greatly reduced if that was not the case. Also maintenance stuff like regular checkups have no place in a true insurance model (it's a 100% certain cost that will inflate your premium).
With rising unemployment and detoriating perspectives among the young i don't really think that making them subsidize older generations who are more likely to be wealthy than they are is such a brilliant idea.
what you describe here is not insurance but a payment scheme managed by 3rd party
Let me give you two numbers. The worst insurance we have, for the cheapest age bracket, local area only, cheapest hospitals etc. etc. etc., costs about $25/month/person. All treatments included, no restrictions. The most expensive top-of-the-line insurance for the most expensive age bracket (65+ seniors) with all bells and whistles, global range etc. costs about $1500/month/person. And those are values for when you pay it all by yourself. Family, business and other kinds of collective contracts get even lower prices.
Yes, there are a few people within this system that end up costing hundreds of times more than what they personally pay, but spread over the entire range of paying customers as a fixed cost of doing business their weight is at most cents for the other paying individuals. By removing them the above prices might go down a little, perhaps to $24.50 and $1490 respectively. Their tail in the bell curve represent such a minor part of the actuarial tables that arguing over this feels cheap to anyone but the executives and accountants that believe they should perfectly optimize those individuals away. Furthermore, I doubt any price reduction would actually happen. A few CEOs would get some bigger bonus, a few investors would get slightly larger dividends, lots of people would be left to happily die away, and that'd be it.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
(opens coat)
Sent from my ENIAC
You happen to live in a civilized country, mate. I don't think you can communicate that notion to the "gubbermint is evil and has the only goal to steal taxes from me as an end in itself"-crowd.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I call bullshit, due to new laws the company I work for changed us all to high deductible insurance. I now pay 250 a paycheck for healthcare and the insurance company does not have to pay a dime until I spend $3,000 out of pocket, so yes a small few get some help, but a large group who sacrificed a lot to ensure our families had something get pushed to the edges, I get a health savings account, but I have to save $3,000 before I can see a doctor with out it costing me more than that. As for paying for preventive care My daughter needed some hearing test early in the year, she went in one day before her birthday, and the insurance company agrees this falls under preventive care, but since it was not her birthday they did not have to cover, if I would have waited another few days it would have been covered, or hay what if they explained this clearly, as I do not have time to research all the loop holes, I work 50 - 60 hours a week with a wife who does the same. So what is this hearing test cost (to be fair they did it twice) $1,000. what did they find, nothing, they want to do an MRI, but my out of pocket will be $4,000. So I have to wait to save up $2,000 for the insurance to pay a dime, and once they do pay they are not paying the entire price, no now I hit my $5,000 expected out of pocket funding, so why do I have insurance?.. Oh ya I get fined by the Government If I don't.. The Government can mandate until they are blue in the face, but if its not profitable the insurance companies will get around it. also from CNBC http://www.cnbc.com/id/100376831/How_Obamacare_Is_Changing_Your_Health_Benefits COST SHIFTING Employers will continue a push this year toward account-based health plans, also known as consumer-driven health plans. These plans come with low premiums, but high deductibles—patients are typically asked to pay the first $3,000 to $5,000 of each year's medical expenses themselves. These plans often add a health-savings account where the employee save pre-tax dollars to pay for those expenses. Though often the employer will add money to the account as well as part of the employee's benefits, the point of these consumer-driven plans, as their name indicates, is to introduce market forces to our inefficient, price-bloated medical system. "It's a step toward giving people more control," says Paul Fronstin, head of health-benefits research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. "They say, 'We'll give you this pot of money and give you some exposure to the health care market.'" read that last part with the first, over and over until 5th grade math kicks in. You have to spend $3000 before you get a dime, but you have to save the $3,000 first ($250 a month) plus the insurance premium you already pay, so you really get no health care until you save the money. So say you like me pay $250 every two weeks to cover a family of 5. that is $9,000 a year out of your pocket. So how will this bring down cost? You will pay it, have no real choice, you will still pay for insurance and now a new group, those who make money off setting up savings plans to meet government regulations is profiting, I see no incentive for the medical industry to lower cost, hell no they have your money already. And since my medical insurance only covers in network doctors, its not like I can shop around.. They all charge the rate negotiated with the insurance company.. WAKE the fuck up.. Obama and his plan is a insurance dream, it is corporate welfare..