Elections, odds and altered states
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| Mary Stevens, Editor of CMIO |
What could change, and how much? The Health Reform Bracketology website has calculated the odds of disruption in six areas of healthcare reform, depending on the outcome of the elections. The website, developed by Leavitt Partners, a firm founded by former HHS Secretary Michael O. Leavitt, lists those six areas as: Individual mandate, employer penalty, premium subsidies, Medicaid expansion, medical loss ratio and Medicare funding cuts.
"One week before the 2010 midterm elections, health policy analysts predict a 73 percent chance that the individual mandate requirement in the PPACA will be modified, stalled or repealed if Republicans reclaim a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives,” stated the press release announcing the website and the odds. “Analysts expect likely modifications in the individual mandate to include raising the income threshold of those exempt from the requirement or denying funding to the IRS to hire new staff to enforce the provision.”
Federal health IT initiatives might also be under fire after Tuesday. “Current research suggests that the rate of adoption of health IT is low, and that health IT may not have the touted beneficial effects on quality of care or costs,” wrote the authors of a recent Viewpoint paper in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
“Foundational cognitive and human factors engineering research and development are essential to better inform HIT development, deployment, and use,” the authors wrote. This last sentence is a crucial inclusion—better health IT is needed, built on research into what works, how and why. Hopefully, this point won’t be lost if and when federal legislators go looking for places to slash funding.
Adoption of some health IT is on the upswing, according to SK&A, which reported that medical overall, U.S. medical office EHR adoption has grown from 36.1 percent to 38.7 percent—an increase of 3 percent—in the period from January to October, the ongoing survey showed.
Yes, that’s slow adoption, and the long-term gains offered by EHRs might be a harder sell in the near future. But that shouldn’t mean that all health IT bets are off.
Stay tuned, as the ever-evolving health IT landscape is sure to be change, regardless of the political back-drop.
Mary Stevens
Editor of CMIO
mstevens@trimedmedia.com