Orrin Hatch: “as we face the close of the 109th Congress in the coming months, I feel it is important that we reauthorize the…”

“as we face the close of the 109th Congress in the coming months, I feel it is important that we reauthorize the Traumatic Brain Injury Act. It is my pleasure to introduce this reauthorization bill along with the ranking minority member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee, Senator Ted Kennedy, with whom I worked on the original legislation over 10 years ago. Our colleagues on the House side, Representatives Bill Pascrell, Jr., and Todd Russell Platts, have just recently introduced a companion bill with the same goal of reauthorizing the TBI Act this year. Sustaining a traumatic brain injury--or TBI--can be both catastrophic and devastating. The financial and emotional costs to the individual, family, and community are enormous. Traumatic brain injuries contribute to a substantial number of deaths and cases of permanent disability annually. Of the 1.4 million who sustain a TBI each year in the United States: 50,000 die; 235,000 are hospitalized; and 1.1 million are treated and released from an emergency department. Brain injuries are the most frequent reasons for visits to physicians and emergency rooms. These statistics are more revealing when one considers that every 16 seconds someone in the U.S. sustains a head injury; every 12 minutes, one of these people will die and another will become permanently disabled.…”