The Health IT Scam

Last week John Goodman posted a brief blurb about the latest problems with Health Information Technology (HIT). The issue deserves a little more attention because it is an abject lesson of how health policy always fails these days.

The articles from the New York Times and the RAND Corporation indicate that HIT has not lived up to expectations. Actually, it is quite a bit worse than that. The RAND piece is a sort of mea culpa for an earlier RAND “study” that predicted $81 billion in annual savings if we adopted HIT (the version I have said $77 billion, but what’s $4 billion between friends?) This RAND piece was the main rationale for spending over $20 billion (in two years) on HIT, but rather than saving money, HIT seems to have cost more money because it made it easier to bill for more services, according to the Times. It may also be creating more errors and inefficiencies in medical practice.

None of this should have some as a surprise. It was widely predicted four years ago when Congress was considering including HIT in the stimulus legislation. President Obama was quoted at the time as saying, “We will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years all of America’s medical records are computerized.” Mr. Obama may be forgiven his blind optimism, after all Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton had joined together to make similar promises. But the people who actually knew something about this and were not lusting after a piece of the $20 billion piñata universally said the opposite — that a top-down bureaucratic system would not work very well and might actually cost more money and result in worse care...