Making the Health IT Bailout Work for You!

Back on April 17, the Wall Street Journal's Elizabeth Williamson reported (online subscribers only) that "stimulus confusion frustrates business." It's a well written story about how businesses are increasingly finding their attention drawn to the question: "What the heck is the government going to do next?"

Not until this morning did I read the print version, which somehow hid itself behind a piece of furniture at home for the last few days. As often happens, the print version is longer. It's also worthy of note, describing how Perot Systems, potentially a big recipient of federal Health IT cash, is angling to get the biggest chunk possible:

“Perot has dedicated dozens of people to staff ‘war-rooms’ in its headquarters
in Plano, TX, and outside Washington, to monitor federal developments, both for
itself and for its clients ‘who don’t have the resources to have people sitting
around watching C-Span'."

This is the way bailout-stimulus spending works: crowding otherwise productive employees out of their real jobs in R&D, sales, or finance, and plunking them in front of TVs instead - so they can mainline direct feeds from the government.

We are living in an Ayn Rand novel. We just haven't experienced the train crash yet.