In a move I don’t quite understand, Wal-Mart has bought search & content site Kosmix for a reported $300m. Kosmix has been doing various things around presentation of search information from different sites and places on the web (including an interesting mash-up of Twitter called Tweetbeat. But it’s most of interest to us as its flagship RightHealth site has been a leader in Health 2.0. While not exactly Google-type money $300m for a company which had raised a total VC investment of about $55m is not nothing. But it appears that Wal-Mart bought it for the technology potential more than for the current revenue or the RightHealth site. So lets hope that we’ll be seeing more investment and more products from RightHealth in the coming years–rather than it being tossed as part of a larger social media strategy from the Beast of Bentonville.

When ONC lunched the meaningful use program paying doctors up to $44,000 or more to adopt electronic medical records, I wondered–“how would they know?” Then I was told there would be a test. But I misheard, it’s not a test. Instead providers get to attest. For those of you like me with poor English skills, that means you get to self-report, which sounds much easier. Go to this page, follow the instructions and the money will magically arrive. Of course you have to be a qualified entity (doctor, hospital, etc) and you have to be getting funds from Medicare or Medicaid. And of course there’s never been any fraud or false reporting in those programs, so we’re completely assured that our tax-dollars (or the loan from the Chinese) are being well spent. Actually there will be audits and checks, and next year the bar for not only the use of the EMR but also the burden of proof will be raised. But for now, this looks like a way to spend that ARRA money fast and you can’t believe that this opportunity will happen for America’s providers again.

One of my sparring partners, Cato libertarian whizz-kid Michael Cannon, has a new column out about Medicaid and why block grants would stop a big problem. He’s right about the problem. Because states get a matching (and in some cases way more than matching) grant from the Feds, they are incented to make their Medicaid programs more expensive. Cannon echoes Ryan’s solution which is to just give them a fixed amount of money (the block grant). But that would instead incent states to spend as little as possible on Medicaid, making the program even worse for poor people than it already its–as John Goodman and others often point out. Of course none of these right-wingers, nor “sensible”centrist Dems like Tom Daschle are prepared to say the correct thing. Abolish Medicaid and fold it into the universal health insurance program that the ACA (sort of) is. Or better yet put everyone into one central pool and have them all buying into a central exchange–proposed in the House version of the ACA but skewered in the Senate.