WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama submitted on Monday a $3.8 trillion federal budget request to Congress for fiscal year 2011. The president said he plans to make healthcare reform – and healthcare IT in particular – a major part of his long-term plans to put America back on track financially.

In keeping with the president’s past support of healthcare IT advancement, this year’s fiscal budget request includes $110 million to strengthen healthcare IT policy coordination and research activities.

Last February, the Administration backed more than $20.6 billion over 10 years to advance healthcare IT adoption in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)  Click here

Democrats are facing the reality that continuing their ambitious politically risky bills and having nothing to show for it could result in disaster in November elections. Congressional leaders say they have no clear viable solution to pass the existing health-care reform bills at the present time.  See AP article

AP By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies are conceding for the first time that they may have to accept a less ambitious health overhaul bill than the massive one they’ve struggled for a year to assemble.
Shorn by Massachusetts voters of their pivotal 60th Senate vote and much of their political momentum, the White House and congressional leaders are considering a more modest version of Obama’s top legislative priority. It could focus on curbing insurance company practices like denying coverage to sick people and on helping low-earning people and small businesses afford coverage, officials said. Click Here

Flexible spending accounts, or FSAs, are near to Frank McCree’s heart — and heartburn. As director of outpatient services for Carolinas Health System in Charlotte, North Carolina, McCree oversaw the acceptance of FSA purchases for seven retail pharmacies and a mail-order pharmacy serving 40,000 employees and their dependents. And he took the heat when employee FSA debit-card purchases were denied at the system’s own mail-order pharmacy. “We worked with the vendor that set up the FSA program at our retail pharmacies, so we assumed that everything would be fine with the mail-order program,” McCree told Drug Topics. “Instead, our employee transactions were being denied. That’s a recipe for heartburn.”
McCree has plenty of company. Independent and small chain pharmacies nationwide are seeing FSA card transactions declined. Long-time patients are being pushed out of independent pharmacies and into chains.  click here

House Dems largely reject idea of passing Senate health care bill

From Dana Bash and Deirdre Walsh, CNN

Healthcare IT News reported on December 08, 2009 | Bernie Monegain, Editor

“The Science of Personalized Medicine: Translating the Promise into Practice” notes that personalized medicine, which targets individualized treatment and care based on personal and genetic variation, is creating a booming market, but is a disruptive innovation that will create both opportunities and challenges for traditional healthcare and emerging market participants”.

“Thursday, December 3, 2009 is one of the drugs used on the sickest patients, and it is not effective against the H1N1 virus in only a few cases. But epidemiologists said experience with other flu strains shows that resistance can spread quickly, making monitoring and prevention crucial”. Click Here for entire article

Why is the artificial deadline of “before the end of the year” being imposed on a law that goes into effect 2014?  For better or worse this law will change health care in America forever.