President Obama's Comments on the Importance of Healthcare Competition -- Colorado Town Hall Meeting   Aug 15, 2009

Q -- as far as providers being required to report -- what was the words -- preventable medical errors in the health care system. Now, as far as health care systems are concerned, we are required to report every error we see. So I kind of want a clarification of how much you're expecting from providers in this system.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, different states have different rules. So we got kind of a patchwork. I don't -- I confess I don't know exactly what the rules are here in Colorado. But about 100,000 people die every year from preventable diseases and illnesses in hospitals. Some of the ways that we could solve this are so simple. There's actually a doctor who's put together a protocol -- washing your hands, a lot of just basic stuff that costs no money -- that has been shown repeatedly to cut these preventable illnesses and deaths down drastically -- by a magnitude of 50 percent, 75 percent reductions in preventable deaths just by applying these things that don't cost any money.

So the question then becomes, how do we get more hospitals, more doctors, more health systems, to adopt these systems. And the best way to do it is to make sure that not only are they reporting these preventable errors, but that they're also available to consumers -- the American people -- so that if they've got too many of them, after a while they start getting embarrassed. Right? I mean, if you found out that there are two hospitals here in this city and one hospital has half the preventable deaths of the other hospital, you'd want to know that, wouldn't you?

The problem is right now oftentimes it's very hard for consumers to get that information directly. So the idea is simply to make sure that that information is packaged in a way where you can comparison shop, and your employer -- if you're getting health insurance from your employer -- could comparison shop. So we're putting some competitive pressure to improve quality across the system. That's what we're talking about. (Applause.) By the way, thank you for being a nurse, because we need more nurses. That's important. (Applause.)All right, gentleman right here in the t-shirt. Hold on one second, we got a mic coming.