Political Quotes

“I thank my friend from California (Mr. Takano) and my colleagues, Representatives Esty, Langevin, Lieu, and Lujan for cosponsoring this amendment. Our amendment would provide $2.5 million to revive the Office of Technology Assessment to provide Congress with unbiased, timely, and nonpartisan reports on a wide range of issues in science and technology. This office is no less necessary today than when it was first started in 1972, or when it was defunded in 1995. As technology continues to advance at an increasingly rapid pace and our partisan divide seems to grow deeper, Congress needs this now more than ever. The OTA did important work in a number of areas, but I would like to highlight just one of those areas in particular. One of the last recommendations the OTA made was that the U.S. should move rapidly to computerized health records and that standards should be put in place to ensure what we now call interoperability. Had we heeded this advice rather than defunding the OTA, we could have saved hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives by ensuring accurate, up-to- date patient data that was accessible regardless of where the patient turned up for care. This also could have helped slow or prevent the opioid epidemic by ensuring that patients would not be able to doctor shop to acquire numerous opioid prescriptions.…”