According to page 16 and 17 of this (PDF) Congressional Budget Office report. According to the report, the 2009 Stimulus package spending on Health Information Technology will run a deficit of $17 billion over 10 years: “…As a result of the effects of the health IT provisions on direct spending and revenues, CBO estimates that enacting the bill would increase on-budget deficits by a total of
$18.3 billion over the 2009-2019 period; it would increase the unified budget deficit over that period by an estimated $17 billion. Increased spending in the near term would be partially offset by Medicare savings in later years; as a result, those provisions would increase deficits by about $30 billion through 2014 but would yield savings in later years, reducing the net 11-year impact to $17 billion total through 2019…” There you have it folks, no break-even point, perhaps not ever. Ten years in the ditch is a very long time. The only thing that could turn this around is a ban on federal spending for proprietary Electronic Medical Record software in which only Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3 software can be purchased with federal funds. Current proprietary vendors can change their product licenses to AGPL to receive public money.