***MULTIMEDIA PACKAGE*** Moriarty, Conaway, Greenstein, Cruz-Perez on Prohibiting Payment for Preventable Medical Errors

***MULTIMEDIA PACKAGE***

MORIARTY/CONAWAY/GREENSTEIN/CRUZ-PEREZ ON PROHIBITING PAYMENT FOR PREVENTABLE MEDICAL ERRORS

Measure Would Protect Consumers through Enhanced Error Reporting; Prohibition of Payment for Severe Medical Mistakes

(TRENTON) - Assembly members Paul D. Moriarty, Herb Conaway, M.D., Linda R. Greenstein and Nilsa Cruz-Perez today issued a multimedia package on their legislation to protect New Jersey consumers from being billed for certain egregious medical errors.

The measure (A-3371) is designed to mitigate serious and preventable medical errors. It would prohibit hospitals from charging patients and their insurance companies for medical bills related to these errors and require public hospital-by-hospital reporting of certain errors.

The multimedia package consists of a video press release on the legislation, audio of same and a transcript of comments from the sponsors.

The video can be accessed directly via our Web site - www.assemblydems.com - or by clicking here.

The audio file is available upon request.

A transcript of comments from the bill's sponsors is appended below:

Assemblyman Paul D. Moriarty (D-Gloucester):

"This bill says that hospitals would be prohibited from billing a patient for certain medical errors that may occur in their institutions.  Quite simply, if a doctor or a hospital did surgery on you and performed surgery on the wrong part of your body, you shouldn't suffer the indignity of having to be billed for that as well."

Assemblyman Herb Conaway, M.D. (D-Burlington):

"Common sense, I think, tells average folks that when you go to the hospital and expect that you're going to have an operation on your right arm, that the only operation you receive should, in fact, be on your right arm."

Assemblywoman Linda R. Greenstein (D-Middlesex):

"So the bill really has two parts.  One is reporting.  It says that consumers will have a right to know information on 14 different types of errors that hospitals make.  These are preventable medical errors."

Conaway:

"We're going to look very closely at things like wound infections and bladder infections and other surgical mishaps.  The hope is that by reporting them, collecting the data, then analyzing where there may be problems with the delivery of care across the spectrum - go to hospitals, require actions plans to be put in place and require accountability for enacting those plans, so that we can reduce errors."

Greenstein:

"The other part of the bill says, that in a more limited group of medical errors - five different types of medical errors - that simply patients will not have to pay the hospitals if these errors are made."

Moriarty:

"If they operated on the wrong body part..."

Assemblywoman Nilsa Cruz-Perez (D-Camden):

"I have a case of someone very close to me that has a problem and she was operated on the wrong breast."

Greenstein:

"...a situation where there's an air embolism..."

Conaway:

"...foreign bodies are left in abdomens and other parts of the body after operations..."

Greenstein:

"...a situation where a blood transfusion is done wrong..."

Moriarty:

"...they could not actually charge you for all the care that's provided after that event.  It kind of makes sense that if someone has an error, you shouldn't have to pay for it.  So, this is really a consumer protection bill."

Cruz-Perez:

"Consumers need this protection, because I think it's unfair if the hospital committed an error that the consumer has to pay for cleaning up the mess that the hospital made."

Moriarty:

"That's what this bill is all about.  It's about protecting consumers from being charged for other people's errors, for events that shouldn't have happened."

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