Although opponents of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) insist it is absolutely horrible, there are some elements that I believe are actually quite good and very reasonable concepts.  As one who has had an intimate relationship with our health care system, I would love to see the industry adopt electronic health record keeping.  Over the past three years, I have seen 11 doctors at four clinics and had three surgical procedures at two different hospitals.   I am now about to undergo some major surgery (at one of the same hospitals) but before that, I must see yet another doctor, a cardiologist, to reassure the officiating surgeon that I will not croak of a heart attack on the operating table.  For my appointment next Thursday, I have been informed I must stop by the doctor’s office to pick up paperwork I can fill out in advance or arrive a half hour early to do so.  That paperwork, I can assure you, will be very much the same as the paperwork I have already filled out about seven  times.  It’s hard to pin down the exact number since with some clinics I have had to go through all the information again if it was more than 30 days old.  There is no standardization among the forms.  They all ask basically the same information but they vary from office to office and some look as if they were written ten years ago and photocopied several thousand times.  In this day and age where Amazon can tell me everything I have ordered from them in the last ten years and Google has records containing every web site I have ever visited, it does not seem beyond today’s technical capabilities to consolidate health records between hospitals and clinics that are within 300 yards to 30 miles away from each other and several are members of the same health care system.