Louisville Medicine Volume 72, Issue 7 | Page 39

OPINION
who were employed and those who were self-employed paid a bit more to Medicare , the country would not need health insurance companies .
In summary , if America is serious about health care for all , it will have to build out an infrastructure that is appropriately transparent while lowering the long-term costs of administering such a service . The first step in this endeavor is to have HIPAA-compliant data repository centers which do not contain social insurance or patient financial data – thereby preventing motivation for identity theft . Such a system can be maintained by those who are best qualified at the lowest cost , and not by individual hospital or physician practices . The administrative cost of billing and the unavailability of crucial patient information to treating physicians would significantly diminish . Furthermore , such data would belong to patients and therefore access could not be inappropriately denied by any expensive electronic medical records company . Other HIPAA-compliant institutions could have access to patient data for purposes of pharmaceutical , medical supply management , and other inventory management .
References
1 https :// pmc . ncbi . nlm . nih . gov / articles / PMC7138369 /
2
https :// www . americanprogress . org / article / 5-things-to-know-about-pharmacy-benefit-managers
3 https :// pmc . ncbi . nlm . nih . gov / articles / PMC6179628 /#
4 https :// www . kff . org / medicare / issue-brief / what-to-know-about-how-medicarepays-physicians
Dr . Hamidi is an Assistant Professor of Neuroradiology in the Department of Radiology at the University of Louisville and practices at the University of Louisville Hospital .
OPINION January 2025 37