Elijah Cummings: “I was just listening to the last speaker, and I just wanted to bring something to the attention of the House. In…”

“I was just listening to the last speaker, and I just wanted to bring something to the attention of the House. In Maryland, we had a situation where we had Maryland General Hospital, which is in my district, as a matter of fact, within 6 blocks of my house, and one of the things that we discovered was that the hospital was providing tests whereby personnel in the hospital knew that these HIV and hepatitis tests, the results were the wrong results. In other words, there was some faulty machinery. There was some problem within the lab itself. And when the whistleblower went to blow the whistle, the whistleblower was fired. Government does have a role in this. The government must have a role. Almost, not almost, every single person in this country at some point is subjected to some type of medical test. As a matter of fact, we in the State of Maryland, it was of such significance that we got the College of American Pathologists to revise their entire program so as to protect whistleblowers, to make sure that if there was retaliation against a whistleblower, that that clinical lab could lose its accreditation. They also are spending $9 million over the next 2 years to revamp their whole process, because here is the College of American Pathologists who oversees some 6,000 clinical labs all around the world, and they realized that it was important that they give proper results and protect whistleblowers, have a better system.…”