William Tauzin: “I rise first to commend a Member of the House who has done some extraordinary work, not even on our committee but on the…”

“I rise first to commend a Member of the House who has done some extraordinary work, not even on our committee but on the Committee on Ways and Means, and that is the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson), who has really contributed mightily to the understanding of this issue and has helped indeed frame much of the solutions that this bill contains. I want to thank the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) of the Committee on Ways and Means for that vital process. I particularly also want to thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell), the ranking members of the subcommittee and the full committee, indeed for the fact that this is a bipartisan effort to do something about medical errors which end up creating victims of a health care system who should never have to suffer because of those errors. We are told in the project of 1999 that was done by the Institute of Medicine, in that report entitled 'To Err Is Human,' that as many as 98,000 people in this country die as a result of medical errors.”