[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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