On Friday, Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced a bill that would provide $4 billion in health IT grants to qualified health care providers who treat low-income patients or those covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program, Modern Healthcare reports. The grants would be paid over five years.
The senators said the Health Information Technology Act (S 1408) would help curb health care costs and increase the efficiency of health care practices.
Stabenow and Snowe also sent a letter to President-elect Barack Obama urging him to consider their bill as a blueprint for broader health care reform (DoBias[1], Modern Healthcare, 1/9).
Daschle Calls U.S. Health IT Efforts an 'Embarrassment'
At a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Thursday, HHS Secretary-designate Tom Daschle said that U.S. health IT efforts are lagging and that he would make widespread health IT adoption a cornerstone of his agenda.
"We don't have an interoperable [health IT] system yet," Daschle said, adding, "And you can argue how long it would take to get there, but it just seems to me that it ought to be an embarrassment to this country -- in this day and age -- that we still don't have an operable system when it comes to health information technology" (DoBias[2], Modern Healthcare, 1/9).