Political Quotes

“It is great to see my friend from Kansas on the floor and looking forward to serving the next 6 years. One of the things I focused on as a member of the Finance Committee on the Affordable Care Act was the idea that we have doctors, hospitals, and nurses who in some cases provide entirely too many tests and procedures and so forth that are needed to treat somebody just in order to cover--as Naval aviation used to say--our 6 o'clock. You didn't want to have somebody come up from behind you to shoot you down. So we talked about covering our 6 o'clock. Doctors, hospitals, and nurses spend a lot of time covering the 6 o'clock, as my friend knows. I am an Ohio State boy. I am going to say something nice about Michigan, which is really out of character here. In Michigan, the University of Michigan Medical School and hospital came up with a policy called Sorry Works. If a doctor, hospital, or nurse made a mistake that adversely affected a patient, they apologized. The idea was to apologize, make up for it, make them whole, help them get well, cover their financial costs and so forth. It is called Sorry Works. It is a good idea. I met a guy who is a doctor and a lawyer--a Republican--from Illinois who took the idea of Sorry Works and he put it on steroids and they called it Seven Pillars. It has been a great example of what actually works to reduce the incidents of medical mistakes in hospitals and nursing homes and also to get better health care outcomes.…”