It's Worse Than We Thought (Porkulus Medical Controls)

Perhaps it was all the hoopla about the historic nature of Barack Obama's presidency. Maybe the hype of election night and all that talk about wishing our first black president well actually made us all believe, for just a fleeting moment in time, that things would not be as bad as we feared they would be. It turns out they are worse.

McCaughey reports that the bill calls for all medical treatments to be tracked electronically by a new federal bureaucracy known as the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, which will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is administering what the federal government considers appropriate and cost effective health care. All this is the brain child of former Senator and disgraced tax cheat Tom Daschle, who recently had to withdraw his name from nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The goal, writes McCaughey, is "to reduce costs and guide your doctor's decisions. These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, 'Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.' According to Daschle, doctors have to learn to give up autonomy and 'learn to operate less like solo practitioners.'"

Hospitals and doctors that are not "meaningful users" of the new system will face penalties. "Meaningful user is not defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose "more stringent measures of meaningful use over time."

Daschle says health care reform "will not be pain free." Seniors, he says, should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. And you thought the government wouldn't ration your health care.

“. . . the bill calls for all medical treatments to be tracked electronically by a new federal bureaucracy known as the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, which will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is administering what the federal government considers appropriate and cost effective health care.”

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Got that? Again: “ . . . medical treatments to be tracked electronically. . . .”

Got it? Good.

I used to laugh at the tinfoil helmet army. More and more I laugh less and less. From another thead:

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Everyone got the part in the bill and again in last night’s infomercial about the “electronic medical records, right?

Hmmm. . . . “Chips and triage.” Sounds like a new appetizer at Applebees’s. (/s)

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“A Survey of RFID in
the Medical Industry
With Emphasis on Applications to
Surgery and Surgical Devices

Mike Mowry
June 9, 2008

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3.2.1 The Need for Tracking within Hospitals

There are several compelling reasons to use RFID technology to track doctors, nurses and
patients inside hospitals. By tracking doctors on a real time basis, a hospital can ensure that
there is always a sufficient number of doctors in any given area of a hospital to take care of
potential emergencies. Although there are usually far more nurses than doctors and the above
justification does not likely apply to nurses, it is still equally justifiable to track nurses. A primary
need for this information is in the event of an infectious disease outbreak. For instance, RFID
tracking of healthcare personnel became an important tool in fighting the outbreak of SARS in
eastern Asia in 2003 [2]. In hospitals in which all staff was tracked using RFID, all staff
members who came into close contact with a SARS patient were able to be quickly identified
and appropriately treated [2].

Privacy concerns may potentially make it more difficult to justify using RFID to track patients, but
there can certainly be some very real benefits to such tracking. For instance, if every patient in
a hospital wears an RFID tag, his/her medical records can be placed in a central database
which could be accessed by any authorized doctor or nurse. Additionally, a hospital that tags its
A Survey of RFID in the Medical Industry Mike Mowry 5

patients could be alerted if a patient wanders into a potentially dangerous area. Furthermore,
RFID tagging of patients could ensure that elderly patients do not wander away from a facility
and that infants are not removed from a hospital without authorization. “

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http://www.winmec.ucla.edu/rfid/course/2008s/Final_project_Mike_Mowry.pdf

and

http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleprint/2536/-1/1

and

http://www.verichipcorp.com/news/1153351495

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