Sometimes when working with legacy software you just start wrapping legacy crap in added layers of complication, hoping to to create a sane interface to the und

Sometimes when working with legacy software you just start wrapping legacy crap in added layers of complication, hoping to to create a sane interface to the underlying insanity. I think the same thing might be happening with auxiliary healthcare companies. I say this because I've worked at a couple such companies, and I see some mentioned on Hacker News from time to time. A new company will look at healthcare in America and say, "I'll start a company, and we'll fix part of this." And to some extend they succeed, they deal with some of the underlying insanity, and stick a nice API in front of it. But ultimately what they really do is bring in a bunch of people to sap more money out of the healthcare industry. I used to be one of them when I worked for such companies as a developer. Ultimately a small part of your high medical bill ended up in my pocket. One of the companies I worked for had hundreds of employees and could have been entirely replaced with a 50 line Python script and a cron job if only the government would pick a standard CSV format and require states to use it. (There was no patient data we were dealing with.) It seems to me, that to make healthcare affordable in America a lot of these auxiliary workers are going to have to lose their jobs. They system must be made much smaller.