Date: 2007-10-18
Speaker: TIM MURPHY (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Pennsylvania

Mr. Speaker. in the news headlines yesterday and today. we learned that more people die from an infection called MRSA than die from AIDS. The news. however. is much worse than this. And that is. if you look at the amount of preventable infections that occur in health care settings. it actually is more like 90.000 people die. will die this year from preventable infections in health care settings. and over 2 million cases will occur. The cost to our health care system in America is over $50 billion. As we look at the cost of health care and how families cannot afford it. it is important that this Chamber take into account what we can do to reduce costs and fix the system and. not just finance the system. And this is one of those areas. Now. recently. the Center for Medicare Services. CMS. also said that they would move towards not funding treatment of preventable infections in hospitals. Now. although that is an important move. and one that will save a great deal of money and one that we believe will help motivate health care centers to take more action. it still does not help with a couple of issues. One is that theres not a universal system across America where citizens can find out what are the infection rates within certain health care settings. And those are important because when one is selecting a hospital for care or going to a clinic. it would be good to know what those infection rates are. You .know. for example. its mandated by law that airlines have to report their ontime rates for when they depart or arrive at the gates at an airport. However. you cannot find that information about the safety levels of the hospital which you may be going for treatment or surgery. and we need to make that available. Nineteen different States require some level of this. but. quite frankly. it is a hodgepodge of different requirements. Some report to the Department of Health. Some report some diseases and not others. And we need to make this uniform across the Nation so that patients can tell and that it is an important aspect of helping people to understand before they go into a hospital. Now. the thing about this is these infection rates .are preventable. You have issues such as MRSA. methicillinresistant staphylococcus aureus. pneumonias. urinary tract infections. and others that could be preventable by a couple of important procedures: washing hands. wearing gloves for procedures. sterilizing equipment. cleaning up before and after procedures. including patients rooms and other areas. October 18. 2.007 making sure that visitors to the hospital follow these same procedures. wearing a hospital gown or other clothes so that patients do not get exposed from one doctor visiting one room to the next. Some countries even require visitors to wear masks and a gown and to scrub. I understand in the United Kingdom they require the doctor to make sure they scrub and not wear jewelry room to room and to put on a different gown as they go to each room so that diseases are not spread. These are important steps that can take place. However. we dont have any kind of universal reporting system in this country. My bill I introduced called H.R. 1174. the Healthy Hospitals Act. would help to make this uniform. And that is it would require the Secretary of Health to come up with a system of reporting and hospitals would give their information and there would be an annual report to Congress of best practices to reduce these deadly diseases. It is tragic that more people die from infection they pick up at a health care center each year than all of our soldiers who died in Vietnam. And if we saw this as the emergency that it is. if. for example. we had heard that a plane crashed somewhere and a couple hundred people died. we would know that all sorts of Federal agencies would be all over that investigating that. If the next day another plane crashed and a couple hundred more died. an uproar would be across America as to what is happening to airplane safety. If it happened a third day in a row. probably we would shut down the airports. But here. when someone dies every 5 minutes. new infections occur all the time. we do not take this kind of action. And we need to see this as an emergency. particularly because there has been a number of hospitals which have tackled this problem and have solved this problem and have virtually eliminated some of their infection rates. We need to do this as a nation. In addition. my bill. H.R. 1174. would also provide. from the savings that come from reducing theseinfections. a grant program to hospitals that have been able to massively reduce or eliminate their infection rates. We need to gather together as a Congress and no longer ignore this problem. which is leading to so many deaths. We need to acknowledge those hospitals and health care settings that are leading to major changes and cleaning this up and also help those hospitals that are not. We can no longer hide from this problem when we see in the news the number of deaths that are occurring there. and even now so many have this. the things that are occurring in schools as well. We have to take vigorous action as a nation to save these lives. And I would hope that my colleagues would sign on as supporters of this bill.