Originally Posted by
NorthwestUteFan
This seems like an insane move, after IHC's equally insane move to build their own shitty medical data/billing/charting software for billions of dollars rather than just buying licenses to the best, easiest to use, and most widespread product (Epic). They will be in desperate need of high-quality IT people to diagnose, customize, and upgrade their program from here on out to suit the needs of their providers. And it will never be anywhere as close to modern and up-to-date as the professional software products are, since those programs are already managing the medical records for hundreds of millions of people across the nation.
On a bigger view, the big problem with driving prices to the bottom is the savings usually tends to come out of employees' salaries and benefits/retirement. And there is little market pressure to cause companies to plow savings back into their employees, as most cost savings will instead go toward stock dividends or schemes to raise stock valuation (e.g. stock buybacks). These are short-term outcomes.
This is precisely the opposite of what the economy needs to expand over the long term. More people at the bottom of the scale need to have more expendable money so they can buy more things. They need to be healthy and they need to be educated.
In a few decades time there is a very good chance that most of our current jobs will be obsolete, whether through shipping manufacturing/customer service jobs overseas, robots replacing manual workers (truck/cab drivers, retail point-of-sale, fast food) or AI (diagnostic jobs in finance, law, medicine, real estate, engineering, etc will be heavily impacted). The entire economy will operate with significantly fewer workers, and finding employment will be exponentially harder than it is now.
We are eventually going to have a serious look our own American brand of single-payer healthcare, retirement, etc, and probably some form of a universal basic income. Because without those things, the masses of people will not be able to feed their families and desperate situations will likely lead to desperate actions and/or significant civil unrest, civil war, etc.