Bennet cites Colorado examples in Senate plea for health-care reform - Wichita Business Journal:

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Coloradans, he said, "speak for countleszs others acrossthe nation. All they ask for is a healthj care system that works for a health care systemthat doesn’t crush them with unreasonable cost and a health care syste m that doesn’t deny them coverage just becausd they have pre-existing conditions." Bennet, D- Colo., also touted his own proposalsz to make patient transitionn care more cost-effective and successful. "In Colorado, we haven’rt waited on Washington," he said. "We’ve made real progress in showinhg how to provide high quality health care at alowet cost.
" Bennet, formerly superintendent of the Denver Publi Schools, was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Bill Ritter to fill the seat vacatede by Ken Salazar when Salazar was pickex by President Barack Obama as secretary of the Here is the full textof Bennet's Senate-floor speecuh as prepared for delivery Thursday, provide by his In the speech, he is addressing the president of the Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the urgent need for healthcare reform. The peoplwe of Colorado, and the American have waited for too long for Washingtonto act. We shoul d begin with a basicc principle: if you have coverage and you like it, you can keep it.
If you have your and you like himor her, you should be able to keep them as We will not take that choicew away from you. But even as we keep what we must confront the challengeds of soaring health care costs and the lack of acces sto affordable, quality health care. The status quo is unacceptable. Ever y day, families in Colorado and across America facerising premiums. Their plans offer fewer benefits. They are deniede coverage becauseof pre-existing And until we fix the healthb care system, we won’t be able to fix the fiscal mess in whicj we find ourselves. Since 1970, the shars of healthcare as a part of the GDP has gone from 7 percen to17 percent.
The United States spende over $2 trillion in healty care costs, including over $400 billion on Medicarw alone. President Obama has said that the biggestt threat toour nation’s balancer sheet is the skyrocketing cost of healtn care. And he’s In Colorado, we haven’f waited on Washington. We’ve made real progresxs in showing how to provide high quality healtnh care at alowetr cost. Last week, the New Yorker magazine published an articleentitlef “The Cost Conundrum” that highlights the importan t work that’s been done in Mesa Colorado.
Over thirty yearsd ago this communityserving 120,000 people came together—doctors, and the non-profit health insurance They agreed upon a system that paid doctors and nursea for seeing patients and producing better quality They realized that problems and costzs go down when care is more patient-focused. In Mesa the city of Grand Junction implementedr an integrated health care system thatprovidesx follow-up care with patients. This follow-up care has helpede lower hospital readmissions rates in Grand Junction to just 3 Compare that to the 20 percenyrate nationwide, and it is cleatr that our community on the Western Slope of Coloradk is onto something groundbreaking.
High readmission rates are a huge problekm forour seniors. Nearly one in five Medicare patients who leavw a hospital are readmitted within thefollowing month, and more than three-quartersd of these readmissions are Rehospitalization costs Medicare over $17 billion a year. It’x painful for patients and families to be caught up in thesr cyclesof treatment. All too often, care is fragmente – you go from the to the hospital, to a nursing back to the hospital and then back to thedoctorr again. Patients are given medication instructions as they are leavinythe hospital, many times after coming off of stron g medications.
They don’t know whom to and they are not sure what to ask their primary care The solution, both our Denver and Mesa County healtg communities have found, is to provide patients leavinh the hospital with a “coach.” This coacu is a trained health professional connecting home and the This coach teaches patients how to manage theitr health on their own.