Wednesday, October 29, 2008 Capitol
Hill Watch
Pelosi Adviser Says Democrats Will Introduce Health
Information Technology Bill in Early 2009
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is
committed to passing in the next session of Congress legislation that
would require physicians nationwide to adopt health information
technologies and could include negative consequences to encourage
providers to do so, according to one of her senior advisers, CQ
HealthBeat reports.
Wendell Primus, senior budget and
health policy adviser to Pelosi, on Tuesday at the Healthcare
Information and Management Systems Society public policy forum said,
"She believes very strongly that it's a prerequisite, a foundation, upon
which our health care system be built." Primus added, "We'll have a good
Democratic [health IT] bill early" in 2009 that will make sure "every
physician's office is wired as soon as possible," he
said.
According to CQ HealthBeat, Primus later added,
"You can have carrots or sticks" to encourage adoption of health care IT,
and one strategy could be withholding Medicare payments from providers who
fail to adopt the technology. Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag at a Senate Finance Committee
hearing in July suggested using negative consequences to spur health IT
adoption among providers. Orszag said, "If you want to get to near
universal health IT in the near future, meaning the next five years, it's
got to be the stick."
Primus said congressional staffers currently
are working on the measure. He added that the legislation likely will
incorporate facets of a House bill (HR
6898) introduced in September by House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chair Pete Stark (D-Calif.), which
includes penalties for providers who do not adopt the technology, and
another House bill (HR
6357) introduced by Energy and Commerce Committee Chair John Dingell (D-Mich.)
that does not include such penalties. Primus said that Pelosi will support
health IT legislation moving forward whether it includes the penalties or
not.
Predicting the Future
It is unclear when and how health IT
legislation will be addressed in the next Congress because of the doubt
surrounding a new administration and whether lawmakers will address larger
health care reform, according to Primus (Weyl, CQ HealthBeat,
10/28). It still is unclear if health IT legislation next year will be a
free-standing measure or part of a health care reform omnibus. Primus said
that the main health care issues will be "access, cost-value and quality"
and that they all could be addressed together. According to Primus, Pelosi
believes health IT is an integral part of addressing all three (Noyes,
CongressDaily, 10/28).
He said health IT "could move
alone very early" but, "are we going to do health care legislation in one
big bill or ... incrementally?" (CQ HealthBeat, 10/28).
Before they take up health IT legislation, Primus said that congressional
leadership first must draft an economic stimulus package and address
appropriations before the continuing resolution runs out in March
(CongressDaily, 10/28). Primus said, "The health care agenda
is going to be very difficult in a world with $700, $800 billion deficits"
(CQ HealthBeat, 10/28).
U.S. Meeting EHR Order
In related news, HHS Deputy Secretary Tevi Troy
in an interview with CongressDaily said the U.S. is "well on
the way" to meeting a goal of providing at least half of the U.S.
population access to electronic health records by 2014 that was part of an
executive order issued by President Bush in 2004. Troy's
comments precede the final meeting of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information
Technology, a federal advisory panel established to monitor the
challenges of implementing a national health IT system. CCHIT will be
replaced with a $13 million public-private sector collaboration, Troy
noted, which will continue the functions of CCHIT "no matter who wins the
election." He said CCHIT is "a very good model" and should be preserved by
the new administration because it has been critical "to provide the right
type of standards for interoperability and privacy protection" and
encourage future adoption of health IT (CongressDaily,
10/28).