I had originally planned on taking a look at how much an X-Ray costs in energy terms. The Healthcare industry sucks up huge amounts of energy. Another thing I planned on looking at is their huge computer usage. Like utility companies, hospitals are nothing but giant billing agencies, add to that all of the data they must store and a hospital has got to be gulping the juice. This articles points out that ALL BURNING Behavior is much like most medical behavior, just plain sloppy living.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1907514,00.html
The Key to Fixing Health Care and Energy: Use Less
Our health-care crisis and our energy crisis are complex dilemmas made of many complex problems. But our biggest problem in both health care and energy is essentially the same simple problem: we use too much. And in both cases, there’s a simple explanation for much of the problem: our providers get paid more when we use more.
Undoing these waste-promoting incentives — the “fee-for-service” payment system that awards more fees to doctors and hospitals for providing more services, and the regulated electricity rates that reward utilities for selling more power and building more plants — would not solve all our health-care and energy problems. But it would be a major step in the right direction. President Obama has pledged to pass massive overhauls of both sectors this year, but if Congress lacks the stomach for comprehensive reforms — and these days it’s looking like Kate Moss in the stomach department — a more modest effort to realign perverse incentives could take a serious bite out of both crises. (See pictures of Cleveland’s smart approach to health care.)
Everyone knows we use too much energy. Our addiction to fossil fuels is torching the planet, empowering hostile petro-states and straining our wallets. Meanwhile, studies by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere suggest that more than half of our energy is lost through inefficiencies, calculations that don’t even include the energy we fritter away through wasteful behavior like leaving lights on or idling cars. We’re on course to increase electricity usage an extra 30% by 2030, which could require trillions of dollars’ worth of new emissions-belching power plants, so it would be much better to eliminate the usage that doesn’t add to our quality of life.
:}
Please read the rest of the brief article. It is thought provoking.
More on Green Medical Technology tomorrow.
:}