Our wondrously wasteful American health-care ‘system’

On the bathetic Bald Hill Road in Warwick, R.I.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

A medical appointment forced me to drive to the hideous Bald Hill Road in Warwick the other day. I try to avoid large parts of  Warwick because its sprawl reminds me of Los Angeles or Route  1 in New Jersey. That, in turn, reminds me of former Public’s Radio and Providence Journal journalist Scott MacKay’s quip that “Florida is Bald Hill Road with palmettos.’’

I’ve had a lot of medical appointments lately (sorry,  FB Trumpsters at the bottom of this column, nothing lethal yet) and noticed yet again the extreme inefficiencies in American health care. For example, one has to fill out form after form after form asking the identical information that was asked before by the same organization. The information integration and record keeping are abysmal. This, of course, raises the cost and crashes the efficiency.

The American health-care system is by far the costliest and least efficient in the Developed World. You’d think that the land that brought the world hyper-computerization could do better!

America tied up with red tape

— Photo by Jarek Tuszyński