Patient safety is, and should always be, an important concern for our committee.  Government policies should always promote and encourage America's companies to produce products and services that reduce the incidents of consumer harm or error.  This is not only sound public policy, but good business sense.  Competition drives innovation, and it is this impetus that has made America the world leader in new solutions to help people live longer and better. 

Two years ago, the House Commerce Committee held a joint hearing with the Committee on Veterans Affairs to focus on the problem of medical errors.  This hearing followed the release of the Institute of Medicine's November 1999 report, To Err Is Human.  In that report, the IOM estimated that at least 44,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical errors, and that the number may be as high as 98,000.    If accurate, medical errors cause a greater number of deaths than motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS.  Even more alarming, we may or may not be properly accounting for all of the medical errors that occur on a minute-to-minute basis or taking the appropriate steps to reduce their occurrence.  

Human error is, by definition, unavoidable.  We may not be able to achieve perfection, but we must strive to ensure that when a medical error occurs, the harm it causes to a patient is minimized.  Today, we have an o