http://altarum.org/health-policy-blog/a-quiet-revolution-in-health-care-in-a-digital-era

The whole American political spectrum shares two goals: lower health care spending and better health care delivery. Unfortunately, most political groupings believe success will emerge from a top-down reconfiguration of insurance. Almost certainly, though, better, cheaper care will come not from a relentless focus on insurance, but from fragmentary, bottom-up innovation already underway.

The Left seeks nationalization and centralization — a single-payer system where a wise federal government funds and allocates care. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) approximates this ideal by subsidizing and enlarging the pre-existing menagerie of public, private, individual and group plans. The Right’s hope is federalism and privatization — shifting power from Washington to states and private entities. Each vision has dozens of variations.

While Americans squabble over insurance, a digital revolution quietly disrupts fundamental notions of health care itself. Imagine a world where schoolchildren produce low-cost prosthetic hands; heart patients use smartphones to perform electrocardiograms on themselves; patients shop the globe for surgical hospitals; cloud computing helps patients manage mental health issues; individual doctors manage thousands of prescriptions a day; and streaming video liberates doctors from computers.

This world already exists, barely perceived by the political community — or the medical community. The key to nurturing it is to remove the obstacles that lie in its path.