Universal healthcare is going to get a big boost from the $825 billion stimulus bill if it passes in current form.
$600 million is allocated on page 50 of the bill to double funding to pay doctors and nurses employed by the National Health Services Corps. The bill states: "A key component of attaining universal health care reform will be ensuring the supply of primary health care providers family medicine, internal medicine, pediatricians, dentists, and nurses."
And, as written today, the bill gives billions to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle's to conduct "comparative medical research" and issue a final report.
Under the bill univeral health care advocate Daschle would receive $400 million to compare various medial treatments. The language, on page 135 of the bill, says it would fund "conduct, support, or synthesize research that compares the clinical outcomes,effectiveness, and appropriateness of items, services, and procedures that are used to prevent, diagnose, or treat diseases, disorders, and other health conditions; and encourage the development and use of clinical registries, clinical data networks, and other forms of electronic health data that can be used to generate or obtain outcomes data."
In other words, his job would be to find out what medical practices work and which ones don't.
Daschle would receive another $1.5 billion to give a final report to President Obama "containing information describing Federal activities on comparative effectiveness research and recommendations for additional investments in such research."
In his recent book on health care, Daschle said these steps would be essential in creating an universal health care program. Billions more have been allocated to the Secretary to develop a government database to store medical records on.
“In an ideal world,” Daschle wrote in his book "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis, “the staff would have access to privacy-protected electronic health records data to use to identify what works and what doesn’t.” If you are interested in examining this information please read pages 135-150 of the bill, available HERE, which discusses stimulus funding for HHS.
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