The cash for clunkers program which mercifully ended today was a disaster of epic proportions in the management of the data needed to fulfill the rebates and reimbursements for car dealers. We had several hundred thousand transactions from the start of the program until now, and the computer systems failed miserably.
Pushing towards a government solution on health care should be examined in this light. Can it be expected to do any better with the more than 37 million annual admissions to hospitals? That works out to more than 3 million a month or several magnitudes larger than the cash for clunkers program.
And that's just for hospital visits. It gets even worse when you figure that people visit a doctor on average of three times a year. The CDC figures that there are nearly 900 million annual doctor visits.
If the government can't handle the relatively small traffic resulting from cash for clunkers, how can anyone reasonably expect it to do a better job when there are hundreds of millions more transactions involved. As repeated investigations into Medicare and Medicaid fraud indicate, the system can't get a handle on bogus and fraudulent transactions unjustly enriching scammers who have gamed the system in their favor.
The Administration has to do a far better job of showing how it can handle the sheer volume of information involved.
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