I offered the following comment to Kent Bottles post,

My New Year’s Resolution: To See the World Clearly (Not as I Fear or Wish It to Be).

http://icsihealthcareblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/kent-bottles-my-new-year’s-resolution-to-see-the-world-clearly-not-as-i-fear-or-wish-it-to-be/#comment-131

As this is the first Monday of the New Year, I had not planned on thinking, at least not to the extent necessary to offer comment on your blog.  I distilled it to three points—perhaps not the three about which you wrote, but three that tweaked my interest—happiness, counterfeit, and healthcare clarity.

Suppose one argues that happiness lives in the short-term.  It is something that one spends more time chasing than enjoying, something immeasurable, and once attained has the half-life of a fruit fly.  I do not think it is worthy of the chase if for no other reason that it cannot be caught.  As such, I choose to operate in the realm of contentment.  Unlike happiness, I think one can choose contentment.

There are those who would have us believe that contentment, with regard to healthcare, comes about through clarity, and that clarity comes from contentment—the chicken and the roaders.  Those are the ones who argue that reform, any reform, is good.  Where does the idea of counterfeit come into play?  I think it is the same argument, the one which states that any reform, even something counterfeit, is good.  The healthcare reform disciples argue that reform in itself is good; be it without objective meaning,purpose, or intrinsic value.  Therein lays the clarity, even if the clarity is counterfeit.

Call me a cock-eyed nihilist, the abnegator.  I am not content.  My lack of contentment comes not from what is or isn’t in the reform bill.  It stems from the fact that reform, poorly implemented, yields an industry strapped to change, an industry that may require greater reform just to get back to where it was.

Healthcare IT reform, HIT, will have to play a key role in measuring to what degree reform yields benefit.  Without a feasible plan, HIT’s role will be negative.  There are those who feel such a plan exists.  Many of those are the same people who believe the sun rises and sets with each announcement put forth by the ONC.

I think the plan, one with no standards, one that will not yield a national roll out of EHR, is fatally flawed.  I think that is known, and rather than correcting the flaws, the ONC has taken a “monkey off the back” approach by placing the onus on third parties, and offering costly counterfeit solutions like Meaningful Use, Certification, Health Information Exchanges, and Regional Exchange Centers.  If the plan had merit, providers would be leapfrogging one another to implement EHR, rather than forcing the government to pay them to do it.