http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01unbox.html?em
According to this article, the lack of computerized health records represents market failure. In short, the health records have such a high positive externality:benefit to doctors ratio that most individual small practices (75% of all practices have less than 10 people) have to treat it as an unreimbursed cost, not an investment.
In that case, it's textbook for government intervention.
That DOESN'T mean it should have been in the stimulus package - it probably should have been outside legislation. Hard to know the opportunity cost because it's hard to know the savings. Presumably, most of the savings come from at the end - moving from 80% computerized to 100% computerized records, because that's when sharing records becomes most feasible.
It's not ridiculous to think that they may be high. In that case, mea culpa. Perhaps this component of the stimulus is fine.
Doesn't mean lots of the rest of it aren't bad. See my post.
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