Obama's Economic Vision

I am subscribed to the change.gov news posts. The included link is the latest:
http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/american_recovery_and_reinvestment/
Let me quote just a bit of text

We must make strategic investments that will serve as a down payment on our long-term economic future. We must demand vigorous oversight and strict accountability for achieving results. And we must restore fiscal responsibility and make the tough choices so that as the economy recovers, the deficit starts to come down.

and

To save not only jobs, but money and lives, we will update and computerize our health care system to cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help reduce health care costs by billions of dollars each year.

How are you going to do these things? He still hasn't outlined how his plans are going to work.

1. I worked in the health care field for a short period of time. For all of that time I sat right next to the wonderful ladies in the billing office. We have been working on this computerized health care thing for a long time now and there are just not solutions for some of the problems. Like the unique identifier for every patient in the country. This is very simple right? One just needs a unique number for every person. We already are most of the way there with social security numbers. But we can't use those for legal reasons. And there is the huge problem of making old data to a new number. The simple fact is that the current state of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems is amazingly bad. Multiple records per patient, incorrectly recorded information, etc. The premise of President-elect Obama's thought is that using computers can work miracles. This just isn't the case, and their is not a good engineering solution.

2. How are you going to reduce the deficit while spending on infrastructure? The math of spending more on various social programs while reducing the deficit simply does not work.

3. How does increasing "oversight", which should really read 'government red tape', help the economy in the long term? It simply increases the overhead (aka cost) of doing business. That doesn't make us more competitive. Instead it makes our goods and services more expensive. The Dollar is currently strong against other curencies. The rest of the world is in a recession. That means that our goods and services are already expensive compared to others. Why should we make them more expensive and become less competitive?