From: David Lubkin (lubkin@unreasonable.com)
Date: Wed Sep 26 2001 - 18:10:14 MDT
At 06:27 PM 9/26/2001 -0500, Randy Smith wrote:
>>That's great. I'm delighted by the recent developments in home testing and
>>automatic monitoring technologies. I can't wait until we can all routinely
>>monitor key health metrics. (I'd like to see a thread on this: what can
>>you monitor easily now, and what's worth doing? I might not want the
>>Japanese analyzing toilet but I think I'd get a watch that monitored your
>>EKG and warned if you were on the brink of a heart attack.) So many
>>problems (in life overall, not just in medicine) are trivial if you detect
>>and deal with them right away and become increasingly severe if you don't.
>
>That sounds like a great idea, but I doubt that this will happen anytime
>soon here in the USA, at least for anyone but yuppie income and above, not
>unless you want to shell out big bucks. The physicians' goons,
>err...lobbyists have too strong a chokehold on Corp-Gov-Media.
HMOs and insurance companies could reasonably want to see monitoring
technologies become more widespread, as a way of lowering their costs, much
as HMOs subsidize the cost of health club memberships. Early detection can
save them many thousands per patient in treatment costs.
In any case, I do have "yuppie income and above", and am willing to pay
bucks for something with a good cost/benefit ratio, whether my insurance
will cover it or not. And some of these things aren't that expensive. For
$170, you can get a watch that monitors your EKG and triggers an alarm if
your pulse goes either too high or too low.
-- David Lubkin.
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