April 1, 2009

Health Reform in the 21st Century: Reforming the Health Care Delivery System

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee:

Consumers Union, the independent, non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports, supports your efforts to reform the American health care delivery system. American health consumers pay the world’s highest prices, yet far too often receive poor health care quality.

We urge that in whatever reforms you enact, you ensure public reporting of medical errors, hospital-acquired infections and quality outcomes. Public reporting increases the pressure on health care providers to do it right the first time.

We support the President’s proposal to deny payments for hospital re-admissions within 30 days, if the re-admission is due to poor quality. We support the President’s proposal to bundle post-acute care services. And we ask that the individual hospital rate of re-admissions for poor quality be publicly reported, so that consumers can add to the pressure for quality reforms.

We also ask that special attention be given to reporting the rate of hospital acquired infections (HAIs). One of our fellow Americans is dying about every five and a half minutes from HAIs. That is 100,000 largely unnecessary deaths per year. About two million Americans suffer HAIs every year, and the extra cost of treating these infections is up to $45 billion per year.

Over the past five years, Consumers Union has helped pass laws in 26 states to require public reporting of HAIs. One of the earliest laws from Pennsylvania has enabled us to see data from two years of reporting, and in just the second year, the level of infections statewide has declined about 8 percent. We believe a national infection reporting law would help focus attention on this deadly but largely preventable problem. It would save lives and money—ASAP.

William Vaughan
Health Policy Analyst