The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is supposed to function like an independent auditor, giving Congress objective estimates of the likely impact on expenses and revenues of proposed legislation. That makes all the more surprising this exchange at a recent hearing (as reported by Congress Daily):
Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus laid the fate of universal health coverage at the feet of CBO Wednesday, much to the resistance of the new head of the congressional bean-counting agency. . . . . "CBO's work will make or break this enterprise," Baucus said at a Finance Committee hearing where CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf testified. "We need CBO to work with us to find a pathway to health reform". . . . "In my judgment, you're not God," the chairman said….. Elmendorf turned the tables, telling Baucus, "The hard decisions will be yours."
A new study [gated, but with abstract] in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that hospitals using health information technology experience lower costs, fewer complications and lower mortality. For every one percent increase in the use of health information technology, in-hospital mortality falls by 1.5%. The technology studied included electronic medical records, decision-support tools, physician order entry and automated medical notes.
However, as pointed out here, the real question is whether the investment in health IT is cost effective. As previously reported here, the CBO finds scant savings, and other problems have been identified in posts by Maggie Mahar and Linda Gorman.
Nonprofit hospitals receive an estimated $12.6 billion of annual tax exemptions, on top of their share of the $32 billion in federal, state and local subsidies the hospital industry as a whole receives each year, according to a 2006 report by the Congressional Budget Office. [link]
The IRS found that fewer than one-fifth of the surveyed hospitals accounted for 78% of the aggregate community benefit expenditures. [link]
The study, which examined how classic recipes have changed over the past 70 years, found a nearly 40% increase in calories per serving, about an extra 77 calories for nearly every recipe reviewed.
CBO sent a letter to Senator Gregg saying that the stimulus will help in the short term – but will shrink the GDP in the long term. CBO says the stimulus will result in so much debt that it will eventually start to crowd out private investment, shrinking the GDP more than if Congress hadn’t passed the stimulus in the first place.
