Abstract
ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS designed to cut health insurance red tape are, with caveats on confidentiality, generally thought to be a good way to reduce costs and hassles for patients and providers. However, a proposal this month by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, MD, to give every insured person a credit card that would facilitate electronic billing and record keeping by containing the details of what the patient is and is not covered for, and to then call that a first step in health care reform, seems mostly to be fueling criticism of the Bush administration's approach to such reform. "Not that it is a bad idea," says Sidney Wolfe, MD, director of Public Citizen Health Research Group, Washington, DC, but the potential savings "are a drop in the bucket of administrative waste. This does not improve access, it improves cash flow," he says. The plan is "a
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