This statistic is misleading. The US is only the richest country on Earth if you consider the mean wealth. By median wealth, the US is ranked 26th. The wealth gap is enormous, and if you're in the upper echelons of the pyramid your health outcomes are vastly better than the clownshoes shitshow that the rest of the country is subjected to.
In fact, the wealth gap is but a reflection of the underlying cause of the problem: legislators corrupted to the interests of the donor class at severe cost to the actual constituents of those legislators.
These kinds of reforms would have had to begin decades ago to make much of a difference.
So... perhaps if we'd had a better goal 50 years ago - single payer or universal medicare or whatever you want to call it - we'd have decades of technical debt that propped up a fairer system, instead of an unfairer one?
Perhaps we need to change our goals today so that 20-30 years from now things will be better then?
Compliance within regulation is a noble goal? I should think it’s ethical goal.
What you refer to is actually a collection of hundreds of millions of individuals, with all sorts of interests, sentiments, ambitions, sometimes conflicting ones.
Voters are incredibly scared of change because it's so vital. The current situation isn't caused by a lack of resources but a lack of focused will
And those who generously give may not oversee how money is spent and likely squandered to a certain degree.
Takes an incredibly self sacrificing individual to risk it all, which is what this requires.
In less rich countries they use paper records, which are worse. Everything is held together with spit and twine.
Of course many countries are worse, but surely you want to look at successes of others and replicate them.
I personally think it's a very dangerous thing to believe, because it means there's no driving force to improve, and it's a part of the reason the country has stagnated so badly.
She also says that, of the half-dozen medical record systems she has used (here in the US), Epic is one of the better ones. (read: least bad)
I'm sure if you talked to medical professionals in Pakistan they would bemoan their medical record system too. It seems to be popular sport in the medical community.
> Modernization is hard, time consuming and very expensive. These regulations are a good driver for all that, but it takes time. Having been in some of these boardrooms there is not typically a cartel of evil executives figuring out how to screw patients. A lot of the time it is a group of relatively normal people trying to hold up a technological and business process house of cards with chewing gum, paper clips and hope.
It bears questioning how, in ”the richest country on Earth”, something as important as a hospital ends up held together with spit and twine.
Inside this richest country, the richest individuals and companies have been capturing ever-larger shares of GDP. Perhaps instead of growing private fortunes, this money could have gone towards modernising these regulated industries?