ARRA Reporting
ARRA Reporting
In February 2009, the US Congress enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). As part of this broad stimulus package, potential future reimbursement incentives may be tied to the use of electronic health records for establishing patient eligibility for insurance and electronic transmission of insurance claims.
Medisoft includes four reports for ARRA reporting:
To access these reports, go to the Reports menu, and select Analysis Reports.
Security levels can be applied to these reports. The default levels are 1, 2, and 3.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, abbreviated ARRA and commonly referred to as the Stimulus or The Recovery Act, is an economic stimulus package enacted by the 111th United States Congress in February 2009.
The stimulus was intended to create jobs and promote investment and consumer spending during the recession. The rationale for the stimulus comes out of the Keynesian economic tradition that argues that government budget deficits should be used to cover the output gap created by the drop in consumer spending during a recession. The modern consensus (a blend of thinking from New Keynesian and New Neo-classical theory in economics) favors monetary over fiscal policy like the fiscal stimulus. However, the Federal Reserve had already cut interest rates to zero, greatly reducing their policy options. The flow of finances was stagnated because of a liquidity trap, or an over leveraged/broke banking system, also limiting monetary policy effectiveness. While many economists agreed a fiscal stimulus was needed under these conditions, others maintained that fiscal policy would not work because government debt would use up savings that would otherwise go to investments, what economists call crowding out. Proponents countered that the negative effects of crowding out are limited when investment has already stagnated.
The measures are nominally worth $787 billion. The Act includes federal tax incentives, expansion of unemployment benefits and other social welfare provisions, and domestic spending in education, health care, and infrastructure, including the energy sector. The Act also includes numerous non-economic recovery related items that were either part of longer-term plans (e.g. a study of the effectiveness of medical treatments) or desired by Congress (e.g. a limitation on executive compensation in federally aided banks added by Senator Dodd and Rep. Frank).
No Republicans in the House and only three Republican Senators voted for the bill. The bill was signed into law on February 17 by President Barack Obama at an economic forum he was hosting in Denver, Colorado.
As of the end of August 2009, 19 percent of the stimulus had been outlaid or gone to American taxpayers or business in the form of tax incentives.