Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon want to fix health care and have indicated they will use technology to do so. But in health care, unlike their own industries of retail, investing and banking, technology is not the answer. Just ask any doctor who switched over to using electronic health records, a technology that increased costs despite their promise to lower them. Sure, health care is messy and technology can help alleviate inefficiencies and access issues that frustrate us all, but fixing the health care cost crisis will require addressing its leading driver: too much medical care.
Take medications, for example. Americans filled a record 4.5 billion prescriptions in 2016, nearly double the 2.4 billion filled in 1997, according to a recent study by Consumer Reports. Did disease really double in 10 years? No, we have a crisis of appropriateness. Consumer Reports noted that more than half of Americans are now taking four or more prescription medications, a sign of how entrenched the problem has become. The alarming trend represents both the treatment of preventable illness as well as the medicalization of ordinary life.
