America spends much more on medical care than any other nation. The United States is currently spending 17.9% of the Gross Domestic Product; contrast that to the OECD mean for industrialized nations of only about 9.5%. Studies demonstrate that dollar for dollar, the U.S. gets medical results which are continuously in the bottom 33% of the world’s developed nations, right down there with Mexico or Hungary.

Lowering healthcare expenses is crucial if the fledgling nation is to reign in its $15 trillion national debt. Medicare, the health system for seniors consumes 15% of the total U.S. budget. Healthcare represents the greatest expense falling just short of military and Social Security. The Medicare program is costing more exponentially as the 79 million baby boomers retire over the next 20 years, increasing the national debt beyond $25 trillion. For those of you keeping score, this small segment represents about the entire size of Germany’s population.

Some of the tech ideas on the table to aide this problem includes Paro, the robotic seal pup equipped with fake fur, big eyes and responds to voice recognition. This little low-cost companion, developed at the AgeLab at MIT, helps calm seniors with dementia. There is also a carpeting system, complete with embedded sensors which monitor how seniors walk and analyzes their risk of falling.
A space equipment engineer at M.I.T. has created a skin-tight suit, outfitted with sensors which can continuously observe the vital signs of its elderly wearer and crank out data into a tablet which provides health alerts. This device was first designed for a landing on Mars.

For complete details on this story, read the Reuters article on this page, US Healthcare, and remember to add your two cents worth. Other ideas are much simpler and ready for testing by state & local governments and private health insurance companies. Marilyn Yeats, 79, suffers from congestive pulmonary failure and utilizes a private healthcare workstation, provided by Humana Corp. The device helps her record of her blood pressure, temperature, mass, and prescription intake

If these new electronics are adapted, they would help remove billions of dollars from a $2.6 trillion health-care burden by giving preventative care while keeping seniors in their homes and out of costly nursing homes and hospitals. In 2010, The Obama administration’s healthcare restructuring legislation works to promote this kind of testing in healthcare technology to develop. One reform would compensate healthcare suppliers a fixed price for every medical condition instead of compensating for individual services. The idea is to create incentives for physicians and specialists to treat patients more effectively by allowing them to keep the difference if they conserve financial resources.

If nobody does anything about this, the Medicare fund will be fully consumed in fewer than 12 years. Standard & Poor’s has warned of more greatly dropping the U.S.’s credit rating in the next three years if the U.S. fails to decrease the expenses of aging in this country. Research at Stanford University in 2011 discovered that two clinics using a similar product called Health Buddy lowered their costs by 7.7 to 13 percent per senior per quarter. The CDC, also in a study last year, predicted that fewer emergency hospital stays would save $7 billion per year.