The USA may have already lost the pending blockchain war
There is a war coming and the US may have already lost it. The war will not be a military one but an economic one. This war will be waged against the US by both our enemies and our allies alike!
This war will be fought by governments through the effective use and implementation of blockchain for its citizens and it has already begun, with Estonia leading the way.
Most US citizens don’t know this yet, but the US is no longer the largest economy — that distinction with respect to spending power has been taken by China. In fact it was in 2014 that China first over took us.
From the title of a Forbes’s article, China’s Now the World Number One Economy And It Doesn’t Matter a Darn, published at the time, we in the US have been pretty laissez-faire about our loss in status, at least, up till now. However, people are starting to take notice. For instance, in a 2017 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) they are predicting that by 2050 the Indian economy will also surpass our economy. This means by 2050 the US will have fallen to at least third place.
Unfortunately, this study uses standard metrics for projecting economic growth and blockchain isn’t mentioned at all.
Without taking into account the economic efficiencies that government implementation of blockchain can bring to a country’s economy, you will greatly underestimate the changes that are going to occur.
Many of the fans of blockchain, particularly the early adopters of Bitcoin, love the anarchist aspects of blockchain. As a result, many people associate blockchain with anti-government activities. However, what they fail to realize is that governments are actually the ideal adopters of blockchain. This is because the can use blockchain to efficiently provide services to its citizens. Estonia and its government, on the other hand, are leading the way.
It is not that folks at PwC (and others) aren’t aware of the potential of governments, like Estonia, to implement blockchain. A month after publishing their study of what the world will look like in 2050, PwC also published the following article titled, Estonia prescribes blockchain for healthcare data security.
However, what people are failing to foresee are the devastating impact it will have on the US economy if every other country implements blockchain for the efficient provision of government services and we, because of our entrenched interests, do not. The reality is that we are going to get f*cked!
Blockchain can be effectively implemented for things like collecting taxes and voter registration but, for the balance of this post, I will focus on public healthcare.
According to recent studies by the prominent think tank the Commonwealth Fund, the US has the most expensive healthcare and at the same time the least effective in the developed world.
Here are the stats on healthcare spending according to the Centers for Decease Control (CDC) from 2015:
· Per capita national health expenditures: $9,990 (2015)
· Total national health expenditures: $3.2 trillion (2015)
· Total national health expenditures as a percent of Gross Domestic Product: 17.8% (2015)
Our US healthcare system is grossly inefficient. A recent study published in Annuals of Internal Medicine found doctors spent 2/3 of their time doing paperwork and only 27% of their time doing direct patient contact.
In 2012, an estimated 15% ($471B) of all healthcare expenditures was consumed by billing and insurance related costs according to a study by BMC Health Services Research.
In a single payor system, like Estonia and most of the other countries in the developed world have, blockchain can reduce the costs associated with billing to pennies on the dollar. By the way, just for perspective, in the US, the wasted money spent on billing and insurance is more than 20 times the entire GDP of Estonia which is only $23.1B.
According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, it is estimated that of the $3.2T spent on healthcare nearly a 1/3 ($1T) of our expenditures are simply wasteful expenditures. Blockchain is ideally suited to reduce wasteful and unnecessary medical procedures. It also has an unparalleled ability to reduce/eliminate fraud.
So just how is the economic warfare going to be waged against the US?
Countries other than the US are going to implement blockchain for the services provided by governments to their citizens. As a result, these countries will achieve huge cost savings that they will turn around and invest in infrastructure projects like high speed rails and more efficient power grids.
We, on the other hand, will have more and more of our economy eaten up by government inefficiencies. Because of our entrenched interests, our infrastructure/economy will crumble. This is a war that, judging from the stupidity of the healthcare debate, we have already lost!
The only hope we have as a country is to get behind initiatives, like California’s recent (but unsuccessful) ballot initiatives to create a single payor healthcare system, to push for such an implementation to happen through blockchain.
If you enjoyed this article please consider sharing it and/or following me.
You also might like one of my recent posts titled, Is “Provably Fair Gambling Blockchain’s Porn?