Ascension

See the following -

Big Tech Should Stay Out of Healthcare

Matthew Buck | Washington Monthly | December 2, 2019

...The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But, as the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Google's Project Nightingale revealed, there is also a potential dark side to these projects. Ascension, it noted, "also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show." That detail raises a key question that's largely overlooked in our health care debates: should the drive to maximize corporate revenues determine how health information technology develops and becomes integrated into medical practice, or should that be determined by medical science and the public?...An alternative path exists. In the 1970s, the Veterans Affairs Administration (VA) developed VistA, an open-source code system that was the country's first EHR system... Read More »

Hospital CEOs Behaving Badly And The Devastating Consequences On The Middle Class

Dave Chase | Forbes | August 26, 2016

When big health insurers propose mergers, it makes for good antitrust enforcement theater to try to block them. However, if government officials want to address anti-competitive activities that have a dramatically bigger impact, they should shift their focus to local market provider M&A activity that consistently show prices increase after the deal is done. However, the most rapacious, anti-competitive practices I’ve seen in my entire career have come from hospitals–frequently from tax-exempt “nonprofits” that would make John D. Rockefeller blush with their brutal actions. The combined impact has created a middle class economic depression that has driven populist presidential campaign success, which was highlighted in a recently released Brookings study.

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