From CNS News, HHS: Everyone Can Opt Out of Government-Mandated Electronic Health Records System
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says that everyone can opt out of having an electronic health record included in the federally mandated national electronic-health-record system created by the stimulus law enacted in February.
The $787 billion economic stimulus bill, the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” signed into law by President Obama in February, calls for “the utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014.” The law says the records should include a person’s “medical history and problems list.”…
How will the government make this happen?
…the law provides for doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers to be given financial incentives to begin participating in the EHR system by 2014. Doctors, hospitals and health care providers that fail to make “meaningful use” of the system by 2015, the law says, will be penalized with reductions in their Medicare payments.
But individual Americans can opt to never have an EHR entered in the system, according to Dr. David Blumenthal, who is overseeing the development of the system as HHS’s national coordinator for health-care information technology.
A question: since doctors will lose Medicare money if they don’t use the system “meaningfully,” won’t that led to doctor pressure on patients to participate? Another question: If a patient opts out of it, will non-participation impact care? The electronic record system has been billed as improving care and saving a lot of money.
A third question: isn’t this another instance in which bureaucrats can point to doctors as the instruments of implementation of the system, not themselves? It lets them continue to say that these medical decisions are between you and your doctor.