The End of Capitalism?
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. - John Adams
This has always been one of my favorite quotes from the Founding Fathers, and it seems to me to be more apropos than ever recently. These days I find myself contemplating a future that until now was unimaginable to me, a future in which the American people abandon the principles of freedom which have been the foundation of our nation since its inception, in favor of what can only be described as a "nanny state." Our banking system is on the brink of being nationalized. The government is dictating who can and cannot lead public corporations. The country is going trillions of dollars into debt in order to expand the reach of government into seemingly every aspect of our lives. What the heck is going on?
And what does any of this have to do with medical transcription?
My wife and I play a little game sometimes where she abruptly changes the topic of a conversation and I try to figure out how in the world she got from point A to point B. Clearly this game is a losing proposition for me, being handicapped with a Y chromosome and all. Almost always she has to backtrack and explain step by step the rapid progression of her thoughts from one subject to another. Having spent a great deal of time perusing the various online MT forums over the course of the last 10 years or so, I can attest to the truly mind-boggling ability of women to hijack a discussion on any given subject and end up light years away from the original topic. I guess some of that has rubbed off on me, so allow me to explain how a conversation about speech recognition led to a blog post about the end of capitalism as we know it.
A few days ago I posted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts a link to a story about how Nuance is marketing its front-end speech recognition technology by encouraging its integration into EHR platforms. The article mentioned a survey completed by 1,255 physicians who have adopted Nuance's Dragon Medical software. According to the survey results, 83 percent said that it improved the quality of their electronic patient notes; 81 percent said that it significantly reduced transcription spending; and, 69 percent said it made their EHR faster and easier to use.
A couple of friends and colleagues in the MT community saw the link on Facebook and offered some input on the story. One commented that she was suspicious of the survey results. She wondered how it was that MTs had to train for hours, weeks, months to edit SR drafts, yet we're supposed to believe that doctors can pick up a microphone and produce accurate and timely reports in no time at all. What about all the lousy grammar, run-on sentences, no punctuation and poor proofreading skills we MTs hear from doctors all the time?
My response was that perhaps it all comes down to the level of quality and accuracy an institution is willing to accept, and that I suspected many are satisfied with an encounter record that vaguely resembles what actually happened, as long as it's cheap. That thought led me to another, which was that perhaps the healthcare sector will have to suffer a major liability catastrophe due to substandard documentation, on par with the banking meltdown, before they finally understand that the bottom line isn't the bottom line, it should be taking care of people. I wondered if greed has so totally blinded us to what's important that America is no longer qualified to have a capitalistic economy any more. My final comment was that if we end up with socialism, it'll be because we couldn't be trusted with capitalism.
Isn't THAT a lovely thought to get your week started!
Am I being overly pessimistic? Perhaps. Do I believe speech recognition will lead to a collapse of our economic system? Of course not. But I keep going back to what John Adams said about the revolutionary new form of government he and the other Founding Fathers left in our care. He was right, you know. The freedoms our system of governance has historically offered us are unsustainable in an environment where morality-simply doing the right thing-has been abandoned in favor of higher profits no matter what they cost. I don't think we have appreciated how fragile a thing our brand of liberty really is when it's not nourished and nurtured and protected by a shield of morality and self-sacrifice. Without those protections, freedom such as we take for granted cannot long endure, and authoritarian control will inevitably follow.
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. - Benjamin Franklin
Please don't hear what I'm not saying. I am a capitalist through and through, and big government is anathema to me. But the harsh reality is that we haven't been willing to regulate ourselves, we haven't been willing to place the welfare of people above the profit margin, and we've all fallen into the trap of greed. We love to point fingers at Wall Street bigwigs-or MTSOs in suits-but how many of US had to have a newer car, a bigger house, more toys, more clothes, more trips? And what corners were WE willing to cut, what good deeds did WE leave undone, what charity did WE leave ungiven, in order to satisfy our wants? Corruption and lack of character at the highest levels of government and commerce are, I believe, simply reflections of a broader collective covetousness that has infected us all. I fear there is a price to be paid for our national transgressions.
But I am not without hope. I'm not giving up on the combination of independence and interdependence that has made our nation great. I think we've lost our way, but journey is not yet over. Perhaps nowhere else but America do we the people have the opportunity to influence how the next chapter of our story will read.
"Well, Doctor, what have we got-a Republic or a Monarchy?" "A Republic, if you can keep it." - Benjamin Franklin