Paper kills more than trees
I went into the Apple store a while back to buy some headphones. Once I’d made my selection, a woman came out with a hand held computer thingie, scanned the item, scanned my credit card, and Emailed me a receipt. My iPhone beeped and I was off…
Or, you know, wanton frolicking sends me down the street to Safeway. Instead of relying on my memory, my awful handwriting, or a piece of paper, she texts me. Maybe from AIM, maybe from Google, but the shopping list goes right to my phone.
Compare this to what happens when a doctor prescribes something. As Ezra Klein puts it “Currently, doctors write your prescription on a pad of paper. They write it in a quick scrawl, to be interpreted by a tired pharmacist.”
Each year 1.5 million Americans are injured or die because some doctor had handwriting as bad as mine. The solution is obvious and almost unused: Email.
So, what prevents doctors from instantly employing this life saving invention? Money. Specifically, it costs about US$3,000 per doctor to implement. And three grand of a doctor’s own, personal dollars to save your life? It’s an investment not many are willing to make. And so the heavy hand of government has to step in and offer incentives.
I guess free-market medicine can’t fix everything. But we knew that…
No. As per the article per the FDA there are many medications/perscriptions that are NOT ALLOWED by the ‘heavy hand of gov’t’ to be e-perscribed so why should doctors adopt a system that is not 100%?
Because a system that is 80% better (which is being worked on to become 100% better) should be preferable to a system which kills or injures 1.5 million people per year.
While that is true, blaming ‘free-market’ for preventing the change over (when there is no free-market in medicine due to the over litigation of doctors and the forced malpractice insurance at high premiums, protected wages by the government and funding by taxes and insurance based laws that give loopholes) is just plain wrong.
I don’t disagree that a move toward electronic perscriptions would be better. I do disagree with blaming something that (a) doesn’t exist and (b) isn’t the main impediment. Also, the system would not be 80% better. The system would be haphazard as doctors now have to remember which ones they can do electronically and which they have to do on paper. Patients get their time wasted when it done wrong. Further lawsuits and lost health/lives due to incorrect usage.
Did Apple email you your receipt because the government required them to, or was the free market involved somehow?