Health care is a business

Health care is a business as any other type of organization. Their main goal is to maximize profits as much and quicker as possible in any ways they can. Therefore, they try to incorporate in their industry more technologies that are up to date and replace some workers with machines in order to minimize their cost as much as possible. These should ensure providing more prompt and quality services. Patients won’t wait for their appointments long time. Likelihood of making mistakes should be reduced as well.

Are robots better workers than humans?

There is no news that now more robots replace many employees who performed not too complicated work especially on assembly lines. For employers it is very profitable despite the fact that they need to face some huge initial investments. Benefits that they will get by changing workers with machines are the following:

- robots can work 24/7 all year around without complaints, strikes and asking for promotions,
- machines won’t be late to work, no able to show up at the work place at all due to family member illness or some other problems. This means the trouble free workforce.

Even if there is the huge initial investment to incorporate such working power, the employers still will save in a long run by not paying salaries, overtimes, health care insurances, retirement plans, unemployment, vacations or sick days. In addition, the products will have more likely higher quality that often happens with human errors. The cost of services also will be reduced over time.

Issues associated with replacement of human employees with robots.

On the other hand, if technologies do replace some medical personnel then there are many questions to ask.

Where those laid off employees go? Of course, they can and will change their qualifications or specialties, but this will take pretty much long period of time. What to do with all those unemployed people now?

Who will pay taxes to governments? Will employers face some certain amount of taxes for their machines as well?

Who will buy those services and products if people won’t have money even to sustain themselves?

How health care insurances will work? How our government is going to cover expenses for Medicare and Medicaid patients? Will they still exist?

Especially in health care world the robots cannot do everything what human can do because they don’t have feelings. There are so many cases when patients get better just because of spiritual support of medical personal and friendly homelike environment they created.

If these questions arise that doesn’t mean that people cannot resolve the issues and therefore shouldn’t move forward. They should and will, but before making such a huge decision that will affect millions of employees everyone should be prepared for that. Government and employers need to run “what if” scenarios in order to be ready to deal with such situations. Consequences of any further steps should be thoroughly valued.