HOW STEVE JOBS SINGLE-HANDEDLY FIXED THE US HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

By request of bluesgirly , a post about telephones.

ITEM: The New York Times  tells the one about Kara Lynn, a woman whose mouth and throat muscles have been atrophied by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), thus removing her ability to speak, and who replaced her $8,000 Medicare-funded text-to-speech PC with a a $300 iPhone 3G running $150 text-to-speech software.

The punchline: Medicare won't cover the cost. Neither will private insurance companies. Why? Because the iPhone is not an outrageously expensive single-purpose $8,000 medical device.

Are you getting all of this?

And you wonder why healthcare is so expensive.

Insurance shenanigans aside, as a professional telephones journalist, I’m more interested in the idea that this woman replaced an $8,000 piece of highly specialized equipment (which is designed to do one thing, but do it very well, which is why it costs so much) and replace it with $450 worth of commercial off-the-shelf  (COTS) equipment.

It’s worth mentioning that while specialized speech-enabling devices are a little behind the times in terms of mobility, they are starting to catch up. For instance, DynaVox (which specializes in speech tech) recently unveiled an upcoming speech-enabling device the size of the GPS unit in yr car with a touchscreen, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connectivity and 8GB of flash memory. It also sports a contact list, MP3/video players and a Web browser (though the latter is optional, otherwise, insurance companies won't cover it). On the other hand, they haven't released pricing info yet, but it’s likely to cost the equivalent of at least three or four iPhones.

What really makes this interesting (to tech nerds like me) is this:

Consumer-grade mobile devices are playing a growing role in the healthcare sector, from doctors and nurses using smartphones and netbooks for work purposes to remote patient monitoring where yr phone tracks your heart rate and blood pressure and emails or texts it back to the doctor’s office or direct to his BlackBerry. In the near future, Bluetooth-enabled body-area networks will take that concept even further.

Then there was the biomedical engineer at Cornell U who built a pocket-sized ultrasound device with $150 in spare parts. Apple will probably have a f***ing app for that by the end of next year.

We’re headed into interesting territory here: state-of-the-art biomedical equipment companies competing with the same company that thought up iPods. Not that mobile phones will replace dialysys machines or brain surgery tools or anything. And of course there will be tradeoffs in performance and security, among other things. (You can’t lose a lab-sized MRI machine in the back of a taxi.)

But as mobile devices get more sophisticated and cheaper  (and as the mobile-tech-savvy generation known as yr children get older) it’s hard not to wonder if at some point insurance providers will run out of reasons to not cover them – and if that happens, how that may affect pricing of specialty gear.

(And yes, I know, some people will try and scam the system to get a free iPhone or whatever. What else is new? People try to scam insurance companies all the time. What goes around comes around, Jim.)

Going mobile,

This is dF

IF ELECTED, I PROMISE TO STRIKE DOWN ON CHRIS DODD’S CANDY ASS

ITEM: World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) CEO Linda McMahon has resigned in order to run for Senate in Connecticut on the GOP ticket.

I’m sure Chris Dodd and the GOP hopefuls will have a lot of fun asking her to explain her management skills.

"Kip Tyler - She's My Witch.wmv" (Watch on YouTube)

To say nothing of whether someone who was Tombstoned by Kane is mentally fit to hold office.

She could just smirk and say, “I never knew mental fitness was a minimum requirement for this job, jackass”

But she won’t. Which is a shame. I’ve said for years that elections in the US would be so much more entertaining – and intellectually honest – if the WWE ran the process. Because admit it – no matter which side of the aisle you sit, you’d have loved for Obama to call Joe Wilson to “get yr candy ass up here and say that to my face”, and then Wilson would go up there and distract Obama with an apology while John Boehner would sneak up behind him to clobber the President with a folding chair, only Nancy Pelosi would warn Obama at the last second and Obama would catch the chair and piledrive Boehner, but then Mike Ross would suddenly turn heel and drop a flying elbow on Obama from behind ...

I mean, that’s pretty much the healthcare debate right there. So why pretend otherwise?

Change I can believe in,

This is dF

HAVE YOU SEEN OBAMA’S GRADES?

ITEM: The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) releases its Privacy Report Card for President Obama. Overall result: better than Bush, but then who isn’t?

The elements related to cybersecurity, medical privacy and consumer privacy I’ll let slide, as I wouldn’t describe those as the most pressing things on Obama’s agenda. However, this is somewhat more distressing for civil liberties junkies like me:

Civil liberties: C+
"The Obama Administration inherited many troubling programs from the Bush Administration: the Patriot Act, Fusion Centers, No Fly Lists, E_Verify, and REAL ID. So far, there appears to be little change with the new Administration. There is a modified version of REAL ID called "PASS ID." The Patriot Act is still law. No Fly Lists and Fusion Centers are being expanded." The organization did note progress in some areas, "as well as open government and judicial appointments."

As Privacy Revolt points out, one thing not on the report card but worth adding is warrantless wiretapping. According to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the Justice Department under Obama “has been pulling out all the stops to kill the major lawsuits challenging the surveillance while giving no indication that the surveillance has ceased.”

And then there’s all that other stuff I mentioned before.

Again, I understand Obama has only been on the job less than a year, he has a long to-do list, and he and I would probably prioritize things differently. But it’s also better to prompt him with constant reminders, rather than wait until, say, mid-2012, by which time he’ll be “too busy” and the next thing you know Sarah Palin is president and you already know where that's going to lead.

Also, the longer this kind of thing goes on under his watch, the more it stops becoming something some other president did and becomes something Obama has willfully continued.

We’re still waiting,

This is dF

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EDITED TO ADD [moments later]: This just in, re The Patriot Act: three provisions in it that made it easier for the govt to spy on Americans are about to expire. President Obama has assured Congress he supports renewing them. Nice one. Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft would approve.