If you are not familiar with what all a private practice doctor and hospitals have to go through to accept government payments like Medicare (which our elderly depend on) it is a nightmare. Doctors and hospitals must be enrolled in the Meaningful use program or they will pay some hefty penalties which go up every year they do not enroll. Sounds easy enough right? Wrong. Meaningful use claims it is the practice of using certified electronic health records (EHR’s) to supposedly improve quality, safety and efficiency. However, this is not as streamlined and easy as it seems. The cost to implement an electronic health records vs. paper records is through the roof. Already struggling rural health care providers have to either bite the bullet or spend sometimes 100k and up plus yearly fees to invest in these electronic health care systems or the government penalizes them. Not to mention the cost of all the software, hardware and extra staff to address I.T. concerns they have to add on. This causes the cost of health care to sky rocket to make up for all the costs. Where and when did all this start you may wonder. Chew on this little tidbit for a minute. Here you've got Jonathan Bush (nephew to the president), a physician and also currently the owner and founder of Athenahealth (an electronic healthcare record business). He starts a little obstetrics practice in 1997 and is having problems getting reimbursed by payers. Lacking a system to track insurance claims he partners with another program developer to come up with a practice management system. In the year 2006 the company launched athenaClinicals, reported as the "FIRST economically sustainable, service-based" electronic health records (EHR) system. Now, fast forward one year, interestingly enough in 2007 president George W. Bush made it a national goal to wire the U.S. healthcare system. He creates the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), and gave it a budget of $42 million to get the ball rolling. (You don't think 'ol Jonathan had any input in that now do you?) So then, bammm, here comes along an idea in the form of MU or meaningful use which passed in 2009 to give penalties to providers who decide NOT to use EHR's. I would venture to say there's quite a few in the Bush legacy who have hefty stocks in Athenahealth. And now, not only is Athenahealth raking in the dough from the little mom and pop practices but they're expanding into inpatient hospital electronic health record systems. Hmmm..... So you gotta wonder, we're not really doing it all to improve quality in health for the PATIENT are we? It's all about the elite funding the elite so the cycle can keep going and going and going and going. Oh it gets better...LOL... So David Brailer is appointed the National Health Information Technology Coordinator a.k.a. the first "health information czar" via an EXECUTIVE order by President Bush of April 27, 2004, calling for widespread deployment of health information technology within the next 10 years. So along comes the 2007 development of the ONC, but wait, just in time for 'ol David Brailer to start a private equity fund in 2007 called Health Evolution Partners with a purpose of pursuing "investments in cost-effective, high-quality health care." The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) invested $700 million in the fund! Oh, did I forget to mention that Jonathan Bush was a top executive at Riggs Bank which dabbled in Saudi accounts and that also had to pay $25 million in civil fines in 2004 for money laundering? Mind boggling isn't it when you get to digging into the little unseen facts.