Category: 
February 4, 2009The House voted this week to pass the economic stimulus package that includes more than $20 billion in Healthcare IT funding to encourage widespread adoption of EMRs throughout the medical and healthcare communities.
Health industry media reports:
“The economic stimulus package’s provision for a $20 billion investment in health IT ”would be, by far, the biggest government infusion to enable medical information to follow patients back and forth among doctors’ offices, hospitals and other providers,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
“Under the bill, physicians, hospitals and other health care providers who adopt health IT systems would be eligible for higher Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements beginning in October 2010. Physicians who demonstrate that they are using health IT effectively would be eligible for $40,000 to $65,000, while hospitals could quality for several million dollars.
“The bill also allocates $2 billion in grants and loans to help states establish electronic health record systems. The Senate’s version of the economic stimulus bill includes $5 billion for state health IT grants.”
Read the full article from iHealthBeat.
The Senate is expected to ammend the bill according to recent reports, including adding an amendment designed to use electronic health records to combat health care disparities. Although the healthcare community has been very vocal in its support of the proposed legislation, not all opinions are positive. Although support for adoption of an EMR is widespread, other aspects of the bill are receiving backlash, including from this Wall Street Journal opinion piece “The Entitlement Stimulus: More Giant Steps Toward Government Healthcare“:
“The more we dig into the pile of spending and tax favors known as the “stimulus bill,” the more amazing discoveries we make. Namely, Democrats have apparently decided that the way to gun the economy is to spend even more on health care.
“This is notable because if there has been one truly bipartisan idea in Washington, it’s that the U.S. as a whole spends too much on health care. President Obama has been talking up entitlement reform as a way to free up the money for his other social priorities. But it turns out that Congress is using the stimulus as cover for a massive expansion of federal entitlements.
“Only the bill’s $20 billion or so devoted to electronic health records can be reasonably called an investment. More typical is the $87 billion that will go to Medicaid, which — silly us — we underestimated by about $6 billion in our stimulus editorial yesterday. This pot of money will be used to blow out the federal matching rate by 4.9 percentage points across the board.”
More coverage as the legislation progresses.
Stumble it!
Sorry, no comments yet.