There has been a lot of talk in the U.S. since the first Obamacare healthcare-insurance-monoplization proposals in 2008/2009 about "death panels." Despite the dramatic name, under Obamacare, "death panels" will be more about telling old farts that don't walk a lot that they can't have a new knee than about killing off grandma.
Here in Massachusetts, we have had healthcare-insurance-monopolization since 2006 under the name Romneycare. (We had car-insurance-monoplization for years too -- called Dukaka -- and it finally went away leading to much lower rates; here's hoping!). Massachusetts is said to be bellwether for the rest of the U.S. and here's the good news:
Based on Massachusetts' experience, you'll be long gone of natural causes before an Obama death panel can get you.
The Mass death panel has been meeting for four years already and after all that time has just concluded, according to the Boston Globe, that it can't tell us mortality rates at various hospitals in the state.
And the reason is: bad software.
The panel's report does not say which software is bad or that it is even really bad. It's just apparently that the panel (or the researchers from Harvard that it hired) put the same data into four different pieces of health informatics software and got four different answers. That's not too comforting, especially if the "death panel" uses the same software to decide whether or not you can have a new knee.
Other Mass.-state Healthcare Quality Control committee information indicates one of the software providers may be 3M (MMM). Other private and publicly traded software suppliers that appear to be likely participants include Microsoft (MSFT)-Windows-based programs out of the U.S.-federal-government Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), various moduled offered by GE Medical (including the former IDX), and software from Cerner (CERN) and Siemens Medical (the former Malvern, PA-based SMS).
Perhaps the venerable Massachusetts General Hospital MUMPS system, written just down the street from the Massachusetts State House over 40 years ago, is involved either via a product such as Intersystems' Trakcare or via an open source version of M. Lawson (LAWS) may enter the market through its acquisition of Healthvision, a move that Lawson made to take advantage of the exploding need for all kinds of healthcare delivery software.
Watching such companies and products makes a lot of sense for investors because a good chunk of money was put aside in the 2009 "stimulus money" for such software and -- as Massachusetts' "death panel" indicates -- it's all upside.
-- Dennis Byron
(no interest in companies mentioned)
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