Healthcare costs in US no laughing matter

A bunch of years ago I was a trouble shooter for the computer systems provided by Burroughs Corporation. My expertise was health care at the time and my task was to determine why a flag ship system at a major western Canadian hospital was not doing what it was supposed to do. I won't go into details but, in the final analysis, the issue was training. Staff were not familiar with computers and some were afraid of them. We fixed the problem by providing better training and trainers.

The real point of this entry has to do with a meeting I attended in Charlotte, North Carolina. The meeting brought together about 50 US Burroughs Health Care reps and myself. I was the only Canadian doing any work in health care for Burroughs in Canada.

For five days I listened to US reps describe their latest commercial conquest. The sold major systems to major and minor institutions -- each of which made our Canadian flag ship system seem puny. They were installing mainframe computers to do insurance billings in 200 bed hospitals that were larger and more expensive than the one we installed in Canada to run a whole 1250 bed hospital. Why so much computer power?

The answer is there was more profit to be made in billing an insurance company than there was in delivering health care services. The US system generally is based on profit... not care. I don't care what the proponents of for-profit health care say -- I lived the nightmare.

Any honest health care administrator or former Burroughs sales guy could set the US debate over health care straight but they are scared. People are carrying guns to town hall meetings. This is not a good sign for Americans.