Greg Beato on Smart Apps vs. Obamacare
Health care costs in the U.S. have been rising so steadily for so long that containment barely seems possible. Even optimists don't dream of cutting the price tag. As its official name-the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act-suggests, Obamacare aims for affordability, not radical reduction. But at a time when we're all walking around with more computing power in our pockets than NASA used to send Apollo 11 to the moon, perhaps we should be setting our expectations higher. Is it really so hard to imagine, in 10 years or so, the advent of advertising-sponsored health care? Or at the very least, bulk-purchased cardiology readings for a Netflix-like $8.99 monthly subscription? The device that could potentially enable such scenarios, writes Greg Beato in the August/September issue of Reason, already exists