Stimulus seeks to stimulate health care

Paperwork: expensive and inefficient

High among the expectations Baby Boomers have for the Obama Administration is a fix for health care.

President Barack Obama took a step in that direction with the signing of the $787 billion economic stimulus bill yesterday in Denver. The bill contains $140 specifically related to health care.

One piece is to help workers who lose their job continue to pay for the health care they were receiving. Another piece, examined here on occasion, relates to Obama's campaign pledge of making patient health records electronically available.

"Because we know that spiraling health care costs are crushing families and businesses alike, we are taking the most meaningful steps in years towards modernizing our health care system," he said after signing the stimulus bill.

"It's an investment that will take the long overdue step of computerizing America's medical records, to reduce the duplication and waste that costs billions of health care dollars and the medical errors that every year cost thousands of lives."

Specifically, the bill provides $19 billion in grants and incentives for companies and doctors' practices to purchase health information technology.

According to a story on WebMD, doctors, hospitals, and health insurers have been slow to acquire electronic prescribing and computerized medical records systems because of their expense and the fact that the systems can't usually talk to each other.

As a result. health care is still driven mostly by paperwork and duplication -- two components that add mightily to the expense of care. It's the administration's hope that money to purchase the health information technology and incentives to use the technology will ultimately drive down that cost.

But this might not be the immediate kind of health care turn around Baby Boomers and others are looking for.

Henry Aaron, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told WebMD that the money isn't a short-term economic stimulus, but instead a "down payment" on an effort to improve efficiency and quality in the health system

"They do hold out the promise of producing very real long-term benefits -- and I emphasize long-term benefits -- in the health care system," he said.

Think of it as trickle down, as opposed to immediate.

Also, don't expect that this is the last word or initiative the president has on health care.