Need Employment? ObamaCare Won't Help You

You're in IT, or med-transcription, and need a job. And you know that ObamaCare will require a lot of new IT or transcriptionists.

Well, fuggedaboutit, sucker.

India's Economic Times declared [ObamaCare] the industry's "biggest bonanza yet" and "far bigger than the Y2K." While it's too early to know the extent of the boon, India's outsourcers — the call centers, the medical record transcribers, the software developers — are quietly gearing up for the increase in administrative work and technology development the health care legislation promises.

...India's outsourcers get new health care work in two ways, by the initiative to computerize personal medical records included in last year's stimulus bill and by run-of-the-mill maintenance of health records both for the newly insured by the reform and the millions of others who already are but whose insurers will need to cut administrative costs.

...Up to 41 percent of the money spent on a health plan in the U.S. goes toward administrative costs, according to a recent Deloitte Center for Health Solutions study. Insurance companies will face mandates to spend as much as 90 cents of every dollar on the actual well-being of a client, Mukerji adds, which will "drive increased need for administrative efficiencies, and thus increased demand for outsourcing."

Similarly, the initiative to digitize medical records could be a multibillion-dollar boost to India's high-skilled software developers. "You don't have enough people in the U.S. to put together these solutions and even if you did, it would be too expensive," said Sudhakar Ram, CEO of Mumbai-based IT solutions firm Mastek. He estimates that digitizing medical records will cost between $10 million to $20 million per U.S. hospital, based on his firm's similar work in the U.K. "That's a huge amount of investment. ... I would say it's a significant opportunity for Indian [firms] over a five- to seven-year time frame."

Well, all that unemployment is Bush's fault, anyway.

HT: Bayou Renaissance Man