On October 29, 2009, the Speaker of the House of the 1st Session of the 111th Congress revealed the results of a tangled legislative process and unveiled a bill “to provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.”  That legislation is now being taken up actively by the U.S. Senate.

Many are debating whether 2000 pages is too long… CLOUD asks if it is too few…

With 300 million Americans, let’s assume that each of us visits the doctor or some other healthcare provider once.  Those visits would yield 300 million pages of documentation for the visit, and of course, at least another 300 million pages of insurance information.  So, that’s 600 million pages… Then let’s assume that 5% of these visits yield a prescription or some further testing, that’s another 15 million pages, with the corresponding 15 million pages of insurance information.  We’re already at 630 million pages…

Thus, the question in the title to this post comes front and center.  Is it possible in 2000 pages to capture all of the nuances of the billions and trillions of decisions that doctors, patients and others in the healthcare system make on an annual basis?  CLOUD is not a political organization, so we do not take a position on the pros or cons of any of the legislation currently pending.  We do, however, believe that by creating a personal mark-up language to give people control over the use of their personal information, the billions and trillions of pieces of data that move around in our healthcare system can yield more friction-less results and better outcomes at lower cost, with privacy that is ensured, rather than just promised.