Steve Lohr:

The administration’s initiative takes on particular significance because this year is when the government begins spending billions of dollars to accelerate the adoption of computerized patient records.
The incentive payments, typically as much as $44,000 a physician, begin this year. But those payments require doctors to make “meaningful use” of “certified” electronic health records. The payments are staggered over five years, and to get the money physicians must use the technology for increasingly extensive record-keeping and reporting. The administration has not said whether a usability standard will be in the next stage of requirements, due by early next year.

The government says it is committed to working with technology companies, medical professionals and academics, to adopt the best approach. Yet common ground has been elusive so far.

At a meeting last month at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., Janet Campbell, a software developer at Epic Systems, a supplier of electronic health records, expressed the industry’s concerns. Doctors are discriminating consumers, she said, and companies like hers work on improving their products in the marketplace every day.

the Government should NOT be using our tax dollars to subsidize health care automation. This approach never works.

James Boxell:

In the Paris banlieue of Boulogne-Billancourt, in an unprepossessing dark stone building, a French institution has a new address. The Guide Michelin had for decades been headquartered in the ultra-smart 7th arrondissement. But a few months ago, it packed up and moved out of Avenue de Breteuil, one of the most elegant streets in Paris, with its lawns, lime trees and direct view of the golden dome of the Hôtel des Invalides.
On the short walk from the Metro station to the new suburban office, I saw a small boy urinating in the street amid piles of rubbish, in the shadows of several grim-looking blocks of flats. It may have been unfortunate timing but it was difficult not to feel sympathy for the staff of the venerable “red book” – which remains, after more than a century of handing out and taking away good food stars, the arbiter of gastronomic excellence in France and beyond.

One person who won’t be visiting this new address is Jean-Luc Naret, who quit as director of the Guide Michelin in December. It’s almost impossible to imagine this flamboyant globetrotter making the trip every morning across the Parisian “frontier” of the périphérique ring road.

By Jeffrey Sparshott and Andrew Ackerman
:

Federal Reserve Vice ChairmanJanet Yellen stands as potentially the wealthiest member of the central bank’s board of governors since joining in October.
Yellen reported assets valued between $5.1 million and $14.4 million, according to financial disclosure forms released Friday.

The disclosure forms, used by officials across the government, report asset valuations and income only in broad dollar ranges and include spouses.

Ed Wallace:

In the first years of the Ford Motor Company, James Couzens had been more responsible than even Henry himself for its success. But Ford took a more active role in his company after the Model T debuted; and Couzens, who hated sharing power as much as Ford did, started looking for other outlets for his talent. His last great contribution to Ford was instituting the $5 workday in early 1914 – which kicked off America’s modern middle class.

However, Ford’s doubling the wages of its workforce was not taken well by other industrialists. The New York Times wrote that Ford’s largesse would create serious disturbances in America. The Wall Street Journal accused the company of “economic blunders, if not crimes;” while the president of Pittsburgh Plate Glass said, “This would mean the ruin of all business in this country. Ford himself will surely find that he cannot afford to pay $5 a day.”

James Couzens knew that all of these assertions were flat-out wrong. He’d run the numbers and predicted that the Ford Motor Company would make more money than ever. And it did.

Jo Nocera:

‘They should have let Bear Stearns fail,” Sheila Bair said.

It was midmorning on a crisp June day, and Bair, the 57-year-old outgoing chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the federal agency that insures bank deposits and winds down failing banks — was sitting on a couch, sipping a Starbucks latte. We were in the first hour of several lengthy on-the-record interviews. She seemed ever-so-slightly nervous.

Bloomberg:

Buffett on today’s job numbers and why he’s confident we’ll get the 2.5 million jobs lost in the current recession back:

“Because the American economy works that way. We have gone through, I don’t know how many recessions, perhaps 15 in the history of this country.”

“But, our system over-shoots periodically. And in this particular case we had a huge bubble. So the fact that there’s a correction after that should not be unexpected. But our system always comes back and it will this time. And it already is.”

On whether the country will recover most of the 2.5 million lost jobs by the 2012 elections:

“I think there’s a good chance of that. We will come back big-time on employment when residential construction comes back. And we way over-produced in houses. I mean we were forming a million or 1.2 million households and we were building close to two million residential units.”

“Big surprise, we ended up with too many houses. We’re not going to blow them up. We’re not going to have kids start getting married at 12 or something. There’s a natural correction. The only way a correction takes place is to have households formation exceed new construction by a significant amount for a significant period of time.”

“We’ve had it for quite a while. And when you see these figures of five or 600,000, that means we’re sopping up housing inventory and I don’t know exactly when that hits equilibrium, but it isn’t five years from now I know that. And I think it actually could be reasonably soon.”

Ed Wallace:

The history of the Ford Motor Company has rarely been told accurately. The moments when facts trump myth are rare; and then immediately, with the sweep of an indifferent hand, the wave of historical misinformation wipes out the truth, reinstating and protecting the legend. Bottom line, “what everybody knows” about Ford is hardly ever all true.

That’s how it is with the creation of Ford’s third car company and its early years. For the truth is that once Ford and his staff of engineers created the original Model A in 1902, the company was organized and primarily run by James Couzens, a minority shareholder foisted onto Ford to keep an eye on the investors’ monies. What no one imagined happening was that from their very first meeting, Ford decided that Couzens and he would partner up against the investment group – and his junior partner didn’t mind going along.

Frank Jacobs:

Over the centuries, the high seas have served as blank canvas for cartographers’ worst nightmares. They have dotted the globe’s oceans with a whole crypto-zoo of island-sized whales, deadly seductive mermaids, giant sea serpents, and many more heraldic horrors. As varied as this marine bestiary is, mapmakers have settled on a single species as their favourite for land-based beastliness: the octopus.
Real octopi are sea creatures, of course. But the Cartographic Land Octopus – CLO for short – need not worry about being in the right ecosphere. Being fictional, it is not restrained to any biosphere, and has only one iconic function: instilling readers with fear and revulsion. The CLO does have a link to the ocean, though. It is clearly descended from an older fictional monstrosity: the Kraken, a sea-bound giant squid whose enormous tentacles dragged whole ships down to their watery graves.

David Feith:

Ahmed Altaie and Bowe Bergdahl—one born 1965 in Baghdad, the other two decades later in Hailey, Idaho—wouldn’t seem to have much in common. But this weekend, as Americans take to beaches and barbeques to celebrate our independence, Messrs. Altaie and Bergdahl share a unique, practically unknown bond: They are the only two U.S. soldiers currently held captive as prisoners of war.

Over the past decade, the U.S. has deployed more than two million troops abroad, with hundreds of thousands in war zones at any one time. Yet in a sign of how much warfare has changed since the time of Thucydides, Grant or even Westmoreland, prisoners of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have been few in number and low in profile. Today there is one in each theater, an unusual symmetry that seems to magnify the solitude and difficulty of their plights.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been a captive of the Taliban for two years, since June 30, 2009. He was a 23-year-old private at the time, about a half-year into his first deployment. The circumstances of his capture remain murky, but one way or another he fell into enemy hands in rural Paktika province, a mountainous region along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

Frank Rich:

“SOMETHING ROTTEN: Obama’s failure to right the wrongs of the crash has haunted his presidency, and could undo it”: “What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. … Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. … For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, … the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.”

Insider dealing continues, unabated.