[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 174 (Wednesday, December 2, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8248-S8249]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, on ObamaCare, one newspaper reports:

       Fewer Patients Have Been Dying From Hospital Errors Since 
     ObamaCare Started.
       Report says about 87,000 lives have been saved since 2010.

  This is as a result of that legislation. I am not going to read the 
whole article.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
the article to which I just referred.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Huffington Post, Dec. 1, 2015]

  Fewer Patients Have Been Dying From Hospital Errors Since Obamacare 
                                Started

                           (By Jonathan Cohn)

       Hospitals have cut down on deadly medical errors, saving 
     around 87,000 lives since 2010, according to a new government 
     report.
       Pinning down the precise reasons for this change is 
     difficult, to say nothing of predicting whether the decline 
     will continue. Improvement has slowed in just the last year, 
     the report suggests. But many analysts think government 
     initiatives within the Affordable Care Act have played a 
     significant role in the progress so far.
       In short, Obamacare may literally be saving lives.
       The new report comes from Agency for Healthcare Research 
     and Quality, which is part of the Department of Health and 
     Human Services and is something like an in-house think tank 
     dedicated to making medical care safer and more effective. 
     Since 2010, the agency has been tracking the incidence of 
     common and frequently fatal medical errors, which include 
     everything from a nurse accidentally giving a patient the 
     wrong medication to a doctor inserting an intravenous line in 
     a way that leads to a blood-borne infection.
       On Tuesday, the agency announced its latest findings on 
     these ``hospital-acquired conditions,'' based on preliminary 
     data from 2014. For every 1,000 patients admitted to and

[[Page S8249]]

     then discharged from a hospital, the agency found, roughy 121 
     of them developed such a condition. That rate is unchanged 
     from last year, but it is down 17 percent from 2010, when it 
     was about 145 out of every 1,000 patients.
       Based on the existing research about what happens to 
     patients who get sick in the hospital and what it costs to 
     treat them afterwards, that decline works out to roughly 
     87,000 lives saved and $19.8 billion not spent on extra 
     medical care, according to the report.
       ``The progress is historic,'' David Blumenthal, president 
     of the Commonwealth Fund, told The Huffington Post.
       ``We have never demonstrated a comparable decline in the 
     history of the U.S. health system,'' added Blumenthal, a 
     physician and researcher who also served in the Obama 
     administration.
       Broadly speaking, the progress is the result of a crusade 
     that dates back at least to 1990s, when the Institute of 
     Medicine released ``To Err Is Human,'' a seminal report 
     suggesting that nearly 100,000 people were dying each year 
     because of preventable medical mistakes. Over time, 
     researchers learned more about why these errors were so 
     common and started developing methods for avoiding them. 
     Probably the most famous of these was the introduction of 
     checklists, like the ones that airplane pilots use before 
     takeoff, for making surgery safer.
       But getting hospitals to adopt these methods was difficult, 
     despite the best efforts of some private-sector 
     organizations, in part because existing financial incentives 
     did not reward hospitals for improving quality. If anything, 
     the opposite was true. Hospitals made money for every new 
     treatment and a patient who got sick in the hospital needed 
     more care, rather than less.
       A major goal of the Affordable Care Act was to reduce and 
     eventually eliminate these incentives for poor quality care, 
     while rewarding the hospitals that getter better results. 
     Today, for example, Medicare pays less to institutions with 
     high rates of hospital-acquired infection, injury and 
     readmission--in other words, large numbers of patients 
     returning to the hospital for treatment shortly after 
     discharge. That's because of a series of penalties the health 
     care law created in 2010, which started affecting hospital 
     revenue three years later. And under an initiative called 
     Partnership for Patients, the federal government provides 
     extra funding to hospitals that agree to monitor patient 
     safety and implement schemes for improving quality.
       Experts can't be sure about the impact of these reforms, in 
     part because previous studies showed that errors were 
     declining even before 2010, albeit at a slower rate. And the 
     new initiatives raise plenty of serious criticisms--whether 
     from hospital officials saying they are cumbersome to 
     implement or from researchers who think the underlying data 
     is unreliable.
       But after the agency published last year's results, showing 
     the steep decline in errors, a wide array of experts said the 
     law's new incentives were influencing hospital behavior--and 
     that, as a result, patients were getting better care. Lucian 
     Leape, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and 
     a pioneer in the patient safety movement, told Politifact, 
     ``I think these data reliable, and the ACA (Affordable Care 
     Act) deserves credit.''
       The real cautionary note in Tuesday's report may be what it 
     says about the future. If this year's preliminary data holds 
     up, and the error rate for 2014 is truly no lower than it was 
     for 2013, that would suggest progress had stalled--with 
     infections and injuries lower than before, but not as low as 
     they could be.
       ``On the positive side, there has been no backsliding, so 
     hospitals are, in the lingo of quality improvement, 'holding 
     the gains,''' Blumenthal said. ``But from the standpoint of 
     public policy and given our obligation to eliminate 
     preventable problems, we would should aim to see continued 
     reductions in rates.''
       HHS officials on Tuesday offered similar thoughts. At a 
     conference in Baltimore focusing on health care quality, an 
     announcement of the new data drew large applause. But Patrick 
     Conway, chief medical officer at the federal government's 
     Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, warned his 
     audience not to be complacent. ``The goal is to get to zero'' 
     errors, he said. ``We've made significant progress. Now the 
     question is how you accelerate that.''

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, among other things, this article says: 
``Hospitals have cut down on deadly medical errors, saving around 
87,000 lives since 2010, according to a new government report.''
  I am not going to read the whole thing, but it is part of the Record.
  The article also says:

       Many analysts think government initiatives within the 
     Affordable Care Act have played a significant role in the 
     progress so far.
       In short, ObamaCare may literally be saving lives.
       The new report comes from Agency for Healthcare Research 
     and Quality. . . . On Tuesday, the agency announced its 
     latest findings on these ``hospital-acquired conditions''. . 
     . . That rate is unchanged from last year, but it is down 17 
     percent from 2010, when it was about 145 out of every 1,000 
     patients.

  That is not the case anymore.
  Continuing:

       That decline works out to roughly 87,000 lives saved and 
     $19.8 billion not spent on extra medical care, according to 
     the report. . . . A major goal of the Affordable Care Act was 
     to reduce and eventually eliminate these incentives for poor 
     quality care, while rewarding the hospitals that get better 
     results. Today, for example, Medicare pays less to 
     institutions with high rates of hospital-acquired infection, 
     injury and readmission--in other words, large numbers of 
     patients returning to the hospital for treatment shortly 
     after discharge. . . . And under an initiative called 
     Partnership for Patients, the federal government provides 
     extra funding to hospitals that agree to monitor patient 
     safety and implement schemes for improving quality.

  So to my friend who continually berates ObamaCare, we have before us 
today and tomorrow an effort to show how wasteful the time is trying to 
wipe out ObamaCare. The House has voted 46 times. The Republicans, of 
course, have lost every time. In the Senate, I think it has been 16 
times or 17 times trying to repeal ObamaCare. Each time, it failed, as 
it will fail in the next day or two.

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