Rep. Stark will propose another health IT bill
- By Nancy zz_Ferris
- Jul 24, 2008
Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Health Subcommittee, said today he will introduce his own health information technology bill, perhaps as soon as next week.
The bill will provide for more incentives for health IT adoption than are authorized in the competing bill approved July 23 by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Stark told reporters. That bill would make $560 million in loans and grants available to doctors and other health care providers in rural and underserved areas and in small practices over five years.
Asked how much he would spend, Stark replied, “whatever it takes to get providers to participate.” He referred to the low rate of health IT adoption among doctors and hospitals.
Although Stark mentioned financial incentives through the Medicare program in his prepared remarks, the congressman said his bill may have a wider menu of incentives, including tax credits. However, he noted that tax credits are useless to many hospitals and clinics that are organized as nonprofits and do not pay taxes.
Stark’s bill also will have privacy protection provisions and will “ensure that the federal government continues to promote development of a comprehensive, fully interoperable [e-medical records] system,” he said.
However, he told reporters, “I’m more concerned with saving lives than saving privacy.” He said it would be a shame to enact so many privacy protections that doctors could not use the EMR systems effectively.
Stark criticized the Bush administration’s health IT program, saying that the Health and Human Services Department “has moved extremely slowly.… The agency seems more interested in pleasing vendors and other entrenched interests than in getting the job done.”
Stark said his bill “should not be seen as an effort to slow down other legislative efforts in this area. The opposite is true.”
But some observers said it would complicate efforts to get House approval of the Energy and Commerce bill, which sponsors were hoping to expedite.
Meanwhile, at Stark’s hearing on health IT, Douglas Reding, vice president of the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, said in prepared testimony that the Energy and Commerce-approved bill could add 10 percent to 30 percent to the cost of implementing a robust EMR.
Reding, who did not appear in person because of weather-related travel delays, said that a requirement in the Energy and Commerce bill for logging all disclosures of personal health information was not workable. He said such disclosures are not logged or accounted for in his clinic’s system, which is one of the country’s most advanced.
In addition, a requirement in the bill for patient consent when records are used in health care operations would hamper quality improvement efforts, Reding’s testimony said.
“If Congress mandates changes such as imposing restrictions on the utilization of patient information for operations as proposed in HR 6357, we estimate that the cost of [health IT] will increase dramatically, undermining the return on investment that should accrue to patients and payers,” according to the testimony.
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