The $787 billion economic stimulus package compromise was approved by the House and Senate on Friday and was signed by the president last week. The health information technology portion of the measure consists of $19 billion in investments, including $17 billion in incentives for Medicare and Medicaid and bonus payments for providers who adopt electronic medical records.
This measure won’t save you any money on your Ohio individual health insurance in the short term but over time more efficient recording keeping, better care decision and will lower cost of care and eventually premiums.
Health Insurance Reform
Qualified electronic health records must have the capacity of providing clinical decision support. The measure will be tasked with developing transparent standards for e-health records for Ohio individual health insurance by the end of 2009.
Other major health items in the stimulus bill include: $86.6 billion to help the states with Medicaid; a temporary 9-month federal subsidy of 65 percent to help unemployed workers pay their COBRA premiums; $1 billion for wellness programs; $500 million for health care professional training programs; and $1.1 billion to support comparative effectiveness research to determine which medical interventions work best and which ones don’t.
This blog has so much good information in it that i could spend all week reading it.