Flutterby™! : Health care

A bunch of you have, with that "oh, him again" sigh, linked to Andrew Orlowski's "Google heals the sick", in which he takes on Sergey Brin talking about some family's use of Google to check on emergency health care information. Scoble has the right response:

The thing Andrew gets wrong is that sometimes people get aches and pains and they don't wanna call 911 everytime. Maybe they have a co-pay on their health insurance. Maybe they don't wanna put costs onto society (calling an ambulance costs thousands of dollars and if your health insurance pays, that gets passed onto all of us in increased costs. If government pays, well, we all pay cause now that $1000 isn't available to increase the quality of our educational system).

(Of course someone in his comments immediately takes him to task for the "money=better education" fallacy, but we'll let that stand for the moment.) The last time I saw my grandfather he mentioned that his town was in danger of losing its volunteer fire department because of the increase in trivial ambulance calls. It sucks that we have to draw on billions of dollars of infrastructure because we're too damned lazy to go take basic first aid classes, but it's good that some of that technology might actually be saving us money.