Late last night (10:45pm EST to be exact) Congress released the negotiated final version of the Stimulus Bill (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) that is on its way to Obama’s desk for signature, which is expected on Monday.
We’ve downloaded the massive bill, which combined (it’s currently broken into two parts, Division A and Division B) comes in at about a 20MB PDF. Once we’ve had an opportunity to extract the HITECH Act portion of the Bill, we’ll be providing a more detailed analysis on where that $19B is headed and how. Not expecting much change as the original Senate and House versions were quite similar with largest divergence appearing to be with the Privacy provisions of the Act.
Update: Finally got the files downloaded. To make it easier for you that are only interested in HIT, need only download Conference Report Division A – HITECH language begins on page 286.
And if that is not enough, you can always read the Opinion piece from the WSJ’s Feb 11th edition (Health-Tech Monopoly) which, oddly enough, shares some of our opinions on the HITECH Act.
John
I have been told the HITECH act also contains incentives and disincentives for physicians who provide the vast majority of their professional services through Medicare Advantage plans. Do you know where in this ACT these provisions are?