I said it beforre in another blog and countless times when the soapbox was still around: the biggest expense for the average health care provider was the insane mandate of Electronic Health Records implementation.

I was reading this on CNN and I think even the more liberal proponents have to see that this reform was far too heavy handed:

Doctor Gives Up on US Health Care

Look, I warned people years ago, when I was heading up accounting at a health care firm that the new laws are not going to keep down costs indefinitely, you need structural reforms, not just more technology.

The latest news from Massachusetts is getting ugly about Health Care Reform (our model is what everyone else is based off). The reason why we saved money and stem cost growth earlier was a combination of factors that were more one off than long term trends. Another major thing, during the conversion of Medicaid pool in Massachusetts, health care organizations and firms were being pushed back up to 90 days on top of the existing 60-75 day turnaround for medical billing. With evaporation of the "free-care pool" of money, hospitals and doctors cannot afford to keep seeing patients. It's just too expensive, but as we cannot deny patient admission or entry, the costs gets placed on the doctors and the firm. It's not like we make profits on health care, even breaking even is hard. Last year, at my old job, costs had soared by 300%, partly due to management and partly due to unpaid bills.

My old firm as you may know from my blogs has gone bankrupt a few months ago after I left them due to the inept management team that could not understand the need to manage money with these frightening and tightening times. They held onto the false hope that the state would not give up on them just due to their demographic or population of medical services provided.

I said this before in meetings and countless times in other areas, EHS systems are expensive and good for larger hospital networks maybe, but smaller clinics and health centers can't afford it with their limited resources. Despite what the state has said that it would provide aid to these smaller firm, if the state discounts the costs by 30%, you would still need to spend 70-80K at least to implement the system and continuing costs in IT personnel for maintaining it.

I didn't just complain, I tried my best to show this doesn't work. I hammered home the nature of costs and escalations to medical providers.

As HG Wells said in his epitaph:

"Damn you all I told you so"