Attack The Root Of The Health Care Mess: Readers ReplyAttack The Root Of The Health Care Mess: Readers Reply

I don't pretend to be a health care expert, but I am married to a health care provider (OB/GYN). Much of what you say in your piece is very true, common sense stuff. As a marketing person of a supplier of many kinds of servers and other IT gear, I am happy to hear that you say "advanced IT tools" will help. But that's not the point of my reply.

Your tag line says in part "root cause," and I agree with that. As customers of the healthcare industry, we need to demand that the root cause of skyrocketing costs be fixed. But it sounds a lot like you think the problem is what the doctors charge for a visit or procedure. I used to think so too until I helped my wife work on her billing. It also sounds like you would point at non-digital record keeping in the doctor's office as part of the problem. I agree more modern data collection could improve the consumer's understanding of their medical histories, but that is not likely to change the consumers' cost very much.

The real middleman in this, and the ones making so much money they are under scrutiny of the SEC for their salaries and stock options, are the insurance companies. The doctors get pennies on the dollar for what they submit for a fee. The insurance companies have huge buying power and negotiate the fees with the doctors and the large companies that help pay for the coverage.

The doctors continue to get less and less for their efforts and the health care costs of companies (and their employees) keep going up. The insurance companies (which use lots of computers and have very sophisticated software) are increasing their share all the time. The insurance companies are very well automated (we file claims to most over the Internet). The insurance companies are very good about delaying payment for claims until asked multiple times and very good about not covering some items until an explanation is tendered by the consumer. Let's go after that "root."

-- Chuck Walters

I imagine that part of the reason health care hasn't yielded to pressure for greater digitization is that the heaviest users of health care services are the people who are least computer-literate themselves--the elderly, the economically disadvantaged. That may be a gross oversimplification, but I'm sure it's an excuse many providers use. That, plus the need for very robust security from companies that are digital neophytes, kinda scares me. That's a bleeding edge I don't want to be hemorrhaging on (to push an analogy to the limit)!

-- Melinda Callis