It was somewhat surprising to see the author come up with "we need standardized interfaces between actors" rather than "we solve this with public healthcare for everyone".
But to be fair, you can easily get lost in bureaucracy in public healthcare too, and private health insurance exists in countries with public health too.
Just switching to a public healthcare, or more likely, a public payer system won’t magically solve the problem. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure it works well.
The difference is that there is evidence from other countries that a public payer system allows for a better medical system to be built on top of it. There’s no evidence that America’s system of patchwork and arbitrary payments by different vested interests each trying to offload their expense onto some other entity allows for a decent system.
Of course it won’t magically happen; other countries have been doing this for decades. It would take time to sort out, but the important difference is having a human-focused common goal of fixing the problem.
The common goal now in the US healthcare system is profit while a secondary goal is patient care. This causes individual healthcare systems to AVOID, AT ALL COST, interoperability. By forcing administration and bureaucracy challenges they can charge exorbitant rates for those largely unnecessary challenges while claiming patient care as paramount. Unfortunately, this also negatively impacts the patients and their care.
Sure, but it would solve one important part which is determining who is paying and whether you can give services to someone, which seems to be the crux of the issue in TFA.
But to be fair, you can easily get lost in bureaucracy in public healthcare too, and private health insurance exists in countries with public health too.