EMR (good) but no electricity grid (bad).
Gratifying that President-elect Obama has gone for a quick start on a national system of electronic medical records. Actually as we pointed out, this could be risky; you don’t want to spend millions on incompatible systems. But there are things you could do while working out the common standards with all deliberate speed.
But we at the influential RBC also supported Candidate Obama’s plans for a national electricity grid (here and here). But sadly no mention of this equally fast-trackable plan in the speech. Why? There already is a designate Health Secretary lobbying for his stuff, but no Energy Secretary. Go to it!
Admittedly Obama has a severe problem in leading just now. As Barney Frank memorably quips:
He [Obama] says we only have one president at a time. I’m afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have.
(h/t Josh Marshall)
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web
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