Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Medicine

How Big Data Is Destroying the US Healthcare System 507

Posted by Soulskill from the optimizing-for-profit-does-not-optimize-for-health dept.
KindMind writes "Robert Cringely writes on the idea that technological advances have changed the health care system, and not for the better. The idea is that companies now rate individuals instead of groups, and so move to a mode of simply avoiding policies that might lose money, instead of the traditional way that insurance costs were spread over a group. From the article: 'Then in the 1990s something happened: the cost of computing came down to the point where it was cost-effective to calculate likely health outcomes on an individual basis. This moved the health insurance business from being based on setting rates to denying coverage. In the U.S. the health insurance business model switched from covering as many people as possible to covering as few people as possible — selling insurance only to healthy people who didn't much need the healthcare system.'"

Comment Re:Diminishing returns (Score 1) 478

by Warwick Taylor (#44793195) Attached to: Schneier: We Need To Relearn How To Accept Risk
I doubt you, personaly, have raised 2 close-in-age children and done so without some part of "aggression and coercion" being used for good. so With one child it may be possible to so control their envioment to achieve this (but probably not), but a 20-month-old will (at some stage) maim a toddler they are living with if not physically stopped. IAASAHDFOF.

Comment Re:Practicality? (Score 1) 230

by Warwick Taylor (#44317269) Attached to: Scientists Silence Extra Chromosome In Down Syndrome Cells

There's no such thing as a neutral term. There is only politics. The above poster was actually conscientious by using the most negative terms for both sides: "anti-life" and "anti-choice," because one side fashions itself "pro-choice" and the other "pro-life." But because of politics, in the media the dominant language used favors one side over the other: "pro-choice" and "anti-abortion." They group pro-lifers along with terrorists who bomb abortion clinics. This is like saying that Martin Luther King Jr. belonged to the Black Panthers. Certainly it's not fair to call pro-choice "anti-life," but neither is it fair to call pro-life "anti-abortion" or "anti-choice." Pro-choice advocates are not fighting for death but for freedom. But pro-life advocates are not fighting against freedom, but for human dignity--for a child who does not choose to die. So what's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but politics decides which roses should be considered sweeter.

Parent post is an Insightful gem. Well done azcoyote.

Slashdot Top Deals

Nobody said computers were going to be polite.

Close