Could the US health insurance industry be replaced by a room full of servers?

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While I understand how the other links in the health-care value chain contribute to the provision of health-care, I am baffled by what, if anything, the insurers do besides paper-shuffling to justify their share of the nation's wildly over-priced health-care system. At best their role can be described as book-keeping, yet they are charging us hedge fund CEO fees for this. For good reason, countries like Canada have turned over the bean-counting/paper-shuffling work to provincial governments in order to save money.

I'd love to have a thread or two about strategies and disruptive technologies that could lead to the elimination of the need for an over-priced book-keeping link in the value chain.

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tynamite

This really interesting question reminds me of Demand Media, which is a content farm. The way a content farm works is comparable to how a insurance industry full of servers would work. A content farm is a business that uses algorithms coming from search engines and social media trends to find out topics to write about, and then pays hundreds of authors a low wage to write about those things. They make content for the search engine, not the user,
which is why eHow is full of rubbish inaccurate information.

So far, the company has paid out more than $17 million to Demand Studios workers; if the enterprise reaches Rosenblatt’s goal of producing 1 million pieces of content a month, the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia

If Demand Media can use algorithms to determine what content should be on their websites next, and appear on the top of Google and not be affected by Panda; then there is no reason why the US health industry cannot be replaced by a room full of servers. Especially as Demand Media uses thousands of filmmakers and writers to make content, publishing 4000 pieces of content a day. What productive produce are the health industry making on this world, other than fiddling around with numbers in a bank account?

It's all about money.
The US health insurance industry is expensive and extortionate as it is. Only in America could you have health insurance for a single man be more expensive than for a couple. America is having a laizess fairre attitude to price fixing, making it virtually legal. Let's not even get to mention the Healthcare Senate Bill.

So the answer is yes. Of course the US health insurance industry can be replaced by a room full of servers.

But with the extortionate prices, oligopoly, and antitrust protection from the government - why would you? Those people working to manage those companies have life easy. Why change?