The Obama administration said Tuesday that care at U.S. hospitals has improved markedly since Obamacare was signed into law, with medical conditions stemming from treatment declining 17 percent from 2010 to 2013.
Officials said that amounts to 1.3 million fewer hospital-induced conditions from 2010 to 2013 — a major reduction in things like ulcers, central-line blood infections, adverse drug reactions, falls or catheter-related urinary tract infections.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality also said improved safety resulted in 50,000 fewer deaths during the three-year period, including about 35,000 fewer deaths in 2013 alone.
“Just think for a moment about what saving even one life means to a family, a congregation, a community. What it means to have one more full seat around the Thanksgiving table,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said in prepared remarks to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’s Quality Conference in Baltimore.
She said the 17 percent reduction translates into $12 billion in savings for patients and medical providers.
While the administration said it had never seen a drop like this, officials acknowledged that it did not have good enough data to compare the reduction to pre-2010 trends. Nonetheless, they insisted that nothing published prior to 2010 came close to the 9-percent annual drop they measured between 2012 and 2013 alone.
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The reasons behind the reduction in hospital errors cannot be fully understood, the officials said, yet it coincided with Obamacare’s efforts to tie Medicare payments to safety performance and federal initiatives such as Partnership for Patients, which established goals for patient safety.
“The facts are unmistakable — the Affordable Care Act is helping to save thousands of lives and billions of dollars every year,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat and staunch champion of Obamacare.
Mrs. Pelosi and fellow Democrats are girding for a new round of legislative attacks against President Obama’s signature heath overhaul when Republicans take control both chambers of Congress in January.
Besides touting patient reforms, the law’s supporters are hoping many more Americans sign up for coverage on Obamacare’s state-based health exchanges. The current enrollment season began last month and lasts until Feb. 15.
“If we’re ever going to make the progress we need to make on prevention, wellness and population health, we have to insure more of the uninsured — and continue getting better coverage to the under-insured,” Mrs. Burwell said in her written remarks.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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