Can’t wait until Obamacare gets to run our healthcare! Then we, too, can have errors like this:
Britain’s transplant authority said Saturday that it was investigating several hundred thousand errors in its organ donor list stretching back about a decade.
The National Health Service Blood and Transplant organization said a proportion of its 14 million-strong organ donor list has been affected by technical errors since 1999 — and that a small group of people may have had organs removed without proper authorization as a result.
The programming error meant that, for example, people who wanted to donate organs such as their lungs or their skin were incorrectly identified as people who wanted to donate their corneas or heart.
But not to worry: The Brits are on top of their data.
The glitch also comes atop a series of information technology mishaps, raising questions over the government’s ability to handle its citizens’ data. Officials have misplaced data on 3 million driving test candidates, 600,000 army applicants, and 5,000 prison officers over the past few years.
Those were dwarfed by the loss, in 2007, of computer disks carrying information — including banking records — on nearly half the U.K. population.
Okay, maybe not so much. But hey, our government will be way better than theirs. Right? Right?
Riiiight.
You know it! For example, our government has NEVER lost track of any nuclear warheads, have they?
We really have no idea whether the US is better than
the UK on this, or any other medical matter, since
hardly any American’s medical record is computerized
like they are in the UK. In fact, the pharmaceutical
and medical companies have fought every attempt to
have portable e-medical records, because then doctors
and drugs could be measured for efficacy, and it would
be easier to sue for malpractice. They want to make
a lot of money selling expensive drugs that hardly
work any better than generic cheap drugs. Everyone is
supposed to rely, not on real world data, but on
bogus studies that the pharmaceutical companies conduct
or finance! It’s similar to how the cigarette companies
had studies saying nicotine was not addictive, and not
a carcinogen either.
With my elderly dad, his local medical record is not
portable at all, but Medicare and the VA must re-enter
the information they need by hand, and of course an
abbreviated record like that is not as helpful as having
all the information. You can imagine all the transcription
mistakes being made for millions of patients due to the
non-portability of their records, and doctors working
off of abbreviated records.
Pit the US medical record situation against the financial.
Every financial company, bank and debt collector can
access 3 computerized credit reports from 3 companies
on nearly every American, yet one hospital cannot
access online the medical record created by another
hospital. You can thank the Republicans for that.
Whatever dude. I love my insurance, works great. And I get to vote too.