Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUSH. Madam Chair, today I am rising to speak out on the severe lack of centers and facilities for Level 1 trauma centers throughout this Nation. I introduced an amendment, which I am withdrawing.

Madam Chair, in my home State of Illinois, our family members are dying due to the tragic lack of Level 1 trauma centers in close proximity to those who need it. Sadly, our newspaper headlines, including yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times, are filled with tragic stories of victims struck by bullets, stabbed, and other kinds of trauma visited upon them. Despite the best efforts of witnesses, bystanders, and paramedics, the lack of nearby Level 1 trauma centers dramatically reduces survival rates and drives up long-term acute care needs and costs.

Madam Chair, in 1999, my son, 29-year-old Huey, was shot two blocks from a hospital. But he couldn't go to that hospital because they didn't have a Level 1 trauma center. So they had to transport him some 10 miles away, where eventually he passed.

This is just one example of one of these sad stories. It is not only patently unfair, but it's an injustice that in a Nation as vast and prosperous as ours that we have a tragic lack of such misplaced priorities by not having Level 1 trauma centers close to the communities where people reside. The fact that a community that's home to about 750,000 people on the greater South Side of Chicago, an overwhelming portion of which sits in my congressional district, does not have one Level 1 trauma care center literally results in the needless loss of life for far too many of us.

Our Nation has seen time and time again the amazing work that gifted trauma surgeons and fully equipped trauma care facilities can deliver to pull patients back from almost certain death. What I want to ensure, Madam Chair, is that the same level of care that is available in the affluent communities in this Nation is also available to the men, women and children in low-income communities.

The aforementioned editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the tragic set of circumstances that befell an 18-year-old trauma victim, who, after being struck by a bullet in a drive-by shooting last August, could not go to the nearby University of Chicago Medical Center, which was only four blocks away, because that facility did not have a trauma center. The University of Chicago Medical Center, one of the major hospitals in this Nation, does not have a level 1 trauma center. Instead, at a time when every moment counts, when every minute counts to save a life, paramedics had to drive the victim 9 miles to the nearest level 1 trauma center, to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where the victim later died.

Madam Chair, situations like this simply should not happen in America. As I stand here today, I am fully aware of the need to provide funding to trauma centers for the financial losses they incur. The National Trauma Care Foundation has estimated that the economic loss to trauma centers due to their treatment of the uninsured and underinsured patients is $230 million per year.

In the same Sun-Times editorial that I mentioned before, they also reported on a study last year by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which found that almost three-fourths of the Nation's emergency rooms are unable to provide round-the-clock specialty care and that almost one-fourth of hospitals cited this as a reason for the loss or downgrading of their trauma center designations.

It is time for us to address the nationwide shortage of trauma care, especially in underserved areas.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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