Stephan Barlas

President Obama’s 2 nominees for the top positions at the FDA have 3 psychiatrists as parents between them. Both Margaret Hamburg, nominated as commissioner of the FDA, and Joshua Sharfstein, nominated as deputy commissioner, are medical doctors and have held top public health positions: Hamburg in New York and Sharfstein in Baltimore. Both of Hamburg’s parents are psychiatrists, according to Neal L. Cohen, MD, director of the Center for Public Mental Health at Hunter College in New York, who knows Hamburg from her days in the early 1990s when she served for 6 years as commissioner of health for the City of New York.

Thanks to the recently passed stimulus package, as much as $44,000 over 5 years will be available to those physicians who become “meaningful users” of electronic health records (EHRs). Physicians who meet the adoption standards in the bill, which have to be ironed out by the Department of Health and Human Services, will qualify for the payments from Medicare. However, physicians who balk run the risk of being docked a tiny portion of Medicare payments starting in 2015.