Washington, DC–(ENEWSPF)–March 25, 2015 – 10:42 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you so much, everybody. Everybody, have a seat. Thank you, Doctor, for that introduction. I want to thank Sylvia Burwell, our outstanding head of Health and Human Services. We’ve got some wonderful members of Congress here today who helped make this happen. And I want to offer a heartfelt thanks to all of the top medical professionals who are here today. We’ve got hospital leaders, we’ve got health care CEOs, doctors, patients, advocates, consumer groups, Democrats and Republicans, who have all come together and spent time and effort to make the Affordable Care Act, and America’s health care system, work even better.
What your efforts have meant is the start of a new phase, where professionals like you and organizations like yours come together in one new network with one big goal, and that is to continue to improve the cost and quality of health care in America.
A lot of you have already taken steps on your own. The American Cancer Society that’s represented here is committed to teaching its members about how new patient-centered approaches can improve cancer care. Governor Markell of Delaware, who’s here, has set a goal of having 80 percent of his citizens receive care through new and improved payment and delivery models within five years. And Dr. Glenn Madrid, of Grand Junction, Colorado, is using a new care model that allowed him to hire case coordinators and use better technology so that patients have access to him 24/7. I don’t know when that lets him sleep — but his patients are sleeping better.
And these are examples of efforts that show we don’t need to reinvent the wheel; you’re already figuring out what works to reduce infections in hospitals or help patients with complicated needs. What we have to do is to share these best practices, these good ideas, including new ways to pay for care so that we’re rewarding quality. And that’s what this network is all about.
In fact, just five years in, the Affordable Care Act has already helped improve the quality of health care across the board. A lot of the attention has been rightly focused on people’s access to care, and that obviously was a huge motivator for us passing the Affordable Care Act — making sure that people who didn’t have health insurance have the security of health insurance.
But what was also a central notion in the Affordable Care Act was we had an inefficient system with a lot of waste that didn’t also deliver the kind of quality that was needed that often put health care providers in a box where they wanted to do better for their patients, but financial incentives were skewed the other way.
And so the work that we’ve been able to do is already spurring the kinds of changes that we had hoped for. It’s helped reduce hospital readmission rates dramatically. It’s a major reason why we’ve seen 50,000 fewer preventable patient deaths in hospitals. And if you want to know what that means, ask Alicia Cole, who suffers — Alicia is right here — who suffers the long-term effects of a hospital-acquired infection. And she is here today because she doesn’t want anybody else to endure what she has. And it’s preventable if we set up good practices, and financial incentives, reimbursement incentives, are aligned with those best practices.
So making sure that the Affordable Care Act works as intended, to not only deliver access to care but also to improve the quality of care and the cost of care, that’s something that requires all of us to work together. That’s part of what the law is all about. It’s making health coverage more affordable and more effective for all of us. And in a lot of ways, it’s working better than many of us, including me, anticipated. (Laughter.)
