Health Technology Is A Promise Unfinanced

4 Pages 1060 Words

The Health Care Industry is a billion dollar a year Industry, which affects every American. With the changing times and technological advances, there comes about change and adaptation. In order to be able to keep up with the current Industry practices and standards, the Health Care Industry has to step out of its place of comfort and complacency with the regular paper, pen and mediocre computer data entry and into the realm of the new and upcoming practices that the Bush administration are trying to implement. According to the article, “the Bush administration has been a proponent of modernizing that nation’s creaky health care system with information technology” (Lohr, 2004, para. 1). With all of these hopes, dreams and aspirations there’s a big downside, the money isn’t there, and the article says that money is “scarce”. These days it seems as if every spare dollar is going to fund the Iraqi war and is going towards the federal budget deficit.
Even with the budget cuts and the funding of the war, “the budget of the Department of Health and Human Services is more than 500 billion a year and most of it is pledged to federal obligations like Medicare, but the department does have more than $60 billion in discretionary funds” (Lohr, 2004, para. 17). The biggest thing in the Health Care Industry is the $50 million dollar request of Dr. David J. Brailer, who is the appointed national health information technology coordinator. Dr. Brailer’s main job is to bring about change in the way healthcare is today and to implement some of the most major changes in the healthcare Industry that we will probably ever see, but to do that it takes money, so his request was not frivolous or unwarranted. “Congress, in its infinite wisdom, zeroed out David Brailer’s office,” said Newt Gringrich, “they couldn’t find $50 million to signal that David Brailer has a real job and what he’s doing is important. Frankly, I th...