Sheldon Whitehouse: “in the last few days, I have come to the floor to speak about reform of our broken health care system: how to make that…”

“in the last few days, I have come to the floor to speak about reform of our broken health care system: how to make that system run better, so that tens of billions of dollars are not wasted every year, so we no longer lose as many as 100,000 Americans every year to avoidable medical errors, so that we no longer spend vastly more of our GDP every year than any other industrialized nation for poorer health care outcomes. I believe three central things need to be reformed. One is improving the quality of care in ways that drive down costs. I spoke about that on Tuesday and used the example of an intensive care unit reform in Michigan that saved $165 million in 15 months and saved over 1,500-plus lives. We need to encourage a lot more of that. The second major reform we need is of health information technology, and I spoke yesterday about the dire state of information technology in health care today-the Economist magazine reported that the health care industry was the worst of any American industry except the mining industry and the significant savings we could generate from expanding our use of health information technology. The RAND Corporation predicted that adequate health information technology would save us from $81 billion to $364 billion per year. We need desperately to capture those savings.”