Bill Clinton: “Well, you may remember that we had a task force a couple of years ago, headed by Secretary Herman and Secretary Shalala…”

“Well, you may remember that we had a task force a couple of years ago, headed by Secretary Herman and Secretary Shalala, which issued, in fact, two reports: One of them recommended the Patients' Bill of Rights; the other set up a quality commission to deal with problems like this. If you looked at it, to me, one of the most interesting things was that a lot of these hospitals, which are very overcrowded and have people coming in all the time and have doctors seeing all kinds of patients in rapid successions, have people lose their lives because of improper prescriptions of medicine, not knowing about a patient's allergy or not knowing about what other medication they're taking. That's a--and I think that we have an opportunity here to work with the public-private partnership which the task force set up to use modern technology, information technology, and to also do some basic old-fashioned changes in procedures that will save a lot of these lives. I'm convinced we can do that. I talked yesterday, on the Patients' Bill of Rights, to one of the leading managed care providers in the country and suggested that they ought to be helping, too, and they agreed with that. We've all got to get together. No one has an interest in seeing these kinds of mistakes made. And we know that otherwise competent people are making a lot of these mistakes. So we've got to work through how we can use technology and how we can maybe even slow some of the actions to make sure that mistakes like this aren't made. But I think we need--this is a very welcome report; we need to study it very carefully. And in order to get something done on it, it's going to take a partnership of everybody involved in health care. Russia”