On eHealth and Medical Accounting

Terence Corcoran, in another of his excellent descriptions of the flaws of government bureaucracy, explains better than I can why the eHealth fiasco in Ontario is doomed to fail (as such things have failed elsewhere).  But the best part is this quote from Arnie Aberman:

It is unlikely that the government will succeed in developing one big EMR project — a better approach is to develop standards for communication between software and then let the market produce many different EMR products. After all, that is the way the financial industry succeeded in automating banking.

I have another idea.  Why don’t we let the banks manage the health care spend?  We need to make the money follow the patient – what better way than to give each consumer a credit card that is only good for health care.  When they get services, they present the card and the hospital or doctor bills to that account (which goes to the state insurer).  That way we can track exactly where the money is going.  And the banks will only charge us 1-2% for the service.   Seems better than trying to build a single monolithic network of a system.