senator bingaman. >> thank you mr. chairman. dr. berwick, take us for being here in thanks for your willingness to serve in this very important position. i would like to go back to this office of inspector general report that you referred to on medical errors. i think the euphemism that the report uses is adverse events in hospitals. and i guess what i am interested in hearing from you, if you could tell me, is your reaction to some of the recommendations. one of the recommendations in the report is that cms should provide further incentives to hospitals to reduce the incidence of adverse events through its payment and oversight functions and then further down it says cms should look her opportunities to hold hospitals accountable for adoption of evidence-based practice guidelines. this is something you spent the last several decades working on. i would be interested in your views as to what opportunities you think you have under this new law to make progress on this. >> thank you senator bingaman. correct, patient safety has been a

senator bingaman. >> thank you, mr. chairman. dr. berwick, thanks for being here and thanks for your willingness to serve in this very important position. i'd like to go back to this office of inspector general report that you referred to on medical errors. i think the euphemism that the report uses is adverse events in hospitals. and i guess what i'm interested in hearing from you, if you could tell me, is your reaction to some of the recommendations. one of the recommendations in the report is that c.m.s. should provide further incentives to hospitals to reduce the incidents of adverse events through its payment and oversight functions. and then another further down it says c.m.s. should look for opportunities to hold hospitals accountable for adoption of evidence-based practice guidelines. this is something you spent the last several decades working on. i would be interested in your views as to what opportunities you think you have under this new law to make progress on this. >> thank you, senator bingaman. you are correct. patien

senator bingaman passed a bill out of his committee that had 15% grenoble standards for the entire country, bipartisan support. he introduced a single version of that bill with five republicans and the senate on board. that is the kind of measure that we think can move forward even in a different congress, and we certainly think in the states. not only should we not be going backwards, we think we can make progress. it is good for our economy and good for public health. host: james is joining us, independent line. caller: my issue is -- what i want a comment about today as -- my issue is 3 energy bridgette the problem with free energy as it is -- free is a to -- my issues free energy. the problem with a free energy is is free. we have technology that can maximize sunlight to cook stuff. i cannot go to wal-mart and buy a sun-powered stove. we have never second boil water that we are not using. -- have mirrors that can boil water that we're not using. i heard that they are trying to make a steam-powered generator in nevada or something. the problem is, we can talk about it and try to educate

daniel akaka, jeff bingaman. sherrod brown. mayoria cant well, amy, herb.e of missouri, bill nelson of florida, john tester of montana. and sheldon whitehouse guest: you can see whether it's nelson. montana, normally, we would say republicans don't have a great time in wisconsin. another thing to consider is is retirements. we consider these cycles where people are going to retire. so that's another wild card. a lot of republican responsibilities. this is what the washington post looks like. sherrod and manz. guest: personally very popular. running even with the republican challenger. largely because of many west virginia, the focus of on barack obama. he managed to make it more of himself. is he the guy he promised himself to be? >> 37 senate seats up this year. ema says, will bill nelson turn republican? guest: i never expect them to. i think somebody like bill nelson is going to have to demonstrate independence, and i would like for him to kind of be visible for staking out independents. >> stu, calling the election in how it happened. elliot is joining

in that regard, they're have been proposals among senator bingaman to require a 401k account balance a participant's projected income screen an retirement, not just the account balance. do you think of giving workers the kind of information would, number one, encourage retirement savings, and what if that were paired with an estimate of how much a person would need in retirement? in other words, here's how much he would need in retirement and here's what your income stream what b. do you think that might encourage people may be to set aside a little bit more if they were able to? >> senator harkin, that is an excellent question and i'm afraid my answer is going to be more complicated and simply yes or no, if you don't mind. this is something we studied for many, many years. we have a 2006 briefed just trying to estimate what people actually do need to have a comfortable retirement. the problem i would see of trying to do something as just a boilerplate regulation or legislation is that there are so many complications in trying to figure out what is an adequate retirement target. it d

a quick premise is that lamar alexander, jeff bingaman, the national academies in 2005, they came backand said we're going in the wrong direction. we need to invest both in r&d as well as in our education, our human capital. which we will down to education as well as again increasing our investment, doubling it really in a national science foundation. we laid this out, it passed by 397 votes in the house. lamarr got unanimous in the senate. i told him the other day if he could do that again, i'm going to nominate him for special envoy to the mideast. we again, something that we all agreed upon, we brought back up this year. i had thirtysomething hearings on it so we could make it really tried to do the right way. bipartisan basis. we get to the house floor, and this, minority to not wanting anything to pass, and basically it got caught up. lamar alexander, to his full credit, says he has 12 republican votes in the senate. and that we should just sort of back off now, wait and go into the lame duck session. so i'm hoping there will be again that moment of sanity where we can at least ge