And So it Begins......

I realize that this is an opinion piece, but it gets the point across quite nicely:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs

To summarize, written into the new "stimulus" package is money to create what is essentially a big government electronic medical tracking system. Now your doctor (as well as any court, politician, computer hacker, etc...) will have access to all medical records on all Americans at any hospital. There will be significant penalties for not adopting this electronic system within a limited time span. In addition, there is the creation of a new position, some sort of Director of Health Information Technology. This individual will eventually oversee a large beauracracy that oversees all healthcare administration and has the right to impose financial penalties on physicians who dare to stray (regardless of patient preference).

In addition to how scary a centralized database of everyone's personal information is, there are also a lot of unforseen consequences of this setup. I was speaking with an attorney that, I know quite well, who mentioned that there may be serious implications to the "standard of care." Prepare for lawsuits whenever anything goes wrong with medical care that doesn't have access to these electronic systems. What, grandma had a drug reaction in your makeshift clinic inside the hurricane disaster zone. Had you read through all of the data in her electronic medical record at some place with electricity, you might have noticed the same reaction ten years ago in a physician's note from another state. Lawsuit!

The director with his minions overseeing all clinical decision making is self explanatory. I don't have a lot of time to write today, but I thought that this needed to be exposed further. This is scary stuff.