Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. It is nice working with the gentleman. This has been a couple of years in the making, and it is way over time. First, let's understand one thing: name and date of birth just isn't cutting it anymore, so this ban on HHS promulgating a unique patient identifier has resulted in a lot of American lives lost. Madam Speaker, Mr. Foster already referenced a Johns Hopkins study that said up to 250,000 deaths per year--and I want you to think about that number--250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error. When we are talking today about the number of deaths from the coronavirus, and saying now it has gone over 145,000, these are deaths caused by a virus. And then here, we have another opportunity, if we are using the right data, we could possibly wipe out medical errors just by having access to that data and being able to cross-reference. Mr. Foster also referenced about opiates that sometimes patients are prescribed as a way to handle the pain. Madam Speaker, I sat in the emergency room with one of my children. And a doctor said to him: We found out what you have; you do have MRSA. It is on your hip, and we are going to have to operate on you, and we are going to have to be able to try and scrape that off. Although it won't be gone forever, it will take care of the problem right now. This is what I am going to do. And he went through the procedure. He also talked about the anesthesia that he was going to use.…”