ACC President Fred Bove, M.D., F.A.C.C., staff Senior Vice President of Advocacy Jim Fasules, M.D., F.A.C.C., and I attended the HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee last week. She did very well and stressed the need for measuring quality, for choice of doctor and hospital and for reducing rising costs. She implied the choice of a "public plan" to compete with private insurance was an option still on the table.

We issued a response to her testimony: “Leaders in both parties and the health care community agree: The American health care system needs to change. What we heard from Secretary Sebelius and committee members is that change needs to come sooner rather than later. The ACC has long advocated for several of the reforms Secretary Sebelius testified about today including payment reforms and the development of a health information technology infrastructure.”

Sebelius also mentioned two annual reports HHS issued last week that all of us should take note of:

• The annual 2008 National Healthcare Quality Report — the highlights are that between 40 and 50 percent of patients do not receive evidence-based (guidelines, performance measures, appropriate use criteria) care in the average inpatient or outpatient encounter. Also, in terms of patient safety, huge gaps continue to be documented. For example, we could save $20 billion by reducing variation and eliminating preventable inpatient nosocomial infections (IHI has demonstrated this is possible).
  
  
• The annual 2008 National Healthcare Disparities Report — Health care is still doing an abysmal job of reducing and changing the disparities problem, despite all the related rhetoric. The ACC is working on a couple of things that would hopefully help this problem: ACC’s CREDO (The Coalition to Reduce Racial & Ethnic Disparities in (CV) Outcomes) project, which will provide new insights for how to solve this problem with respect to CV disease, and using the IC3 Program to improve adherence to guidelines and performance measures.

*** Official photo of Kathleen Sebelius. From Wikimedia Commons. ***