Saturday, March 21, 2009
Obama's $80 Billion Exaggeration - WSJ.com
$80 billion a year is a really big number.
Either someone didn't do much research, or else they have very little respect for taxpayer money...
Either someone didn't do much research, or else they have very little respect for taxpayer money...
Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartsband report in the Wall Street Journal:
"Following his announcement, we spoke with fellow physicians at the Harvard teaching hospitals, where electronic medical records have been in use for years. All of us were dumbfounded, wondering how such dramatic claims of cost-saving and quality improvement could be true.
The basis for the president's proposal is a theoretical study published in 2005 by the RAND Corporation, funded by companies including Hewlett-Packard and Xerox that stand to financially benefit from such an electronic system. And, as the RAND policy analysts readily admit in their report, there was no compelling evidence at the time to support their theoretical claims. Moreover, in the four years since the report, considerable data have been obtained that undermine their claims. The RAND study and the Obama proposal it spawned appear to be an elegant exercise in wishful thinking."
