Please write an Op-Ed to your newspaper of choice in which you argue for national attention to quality and patient safety improvement OR to expanding access and equity in the U.S. health care system.
For those that write about quality, you may wish to include discussion of some of the following: provide evidence on the current state of quality and patient safety in the U.S. health system:

National attention is currently focused on the debacle of The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) roll out. The Federal Health Exchange website, cancelling of thousands of insurance plans and the dismal enrollment numbers are some of the items inundating our headlines. One of the main goals of the ACA is to improve access to health care. It seems as though, with all the partisan squabbling, we do not see much in the media about how the ACA plans to address safety and quality issues. Medical errors and unsafe care are responsible for the death of an estimated 90,000 patients each year, costing more than $4.5 billion in hospital health care costs. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), healthcare associated infections are one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States with approximately $33 billion in excess health care costs per year. For solutions to the healthcare cost conundrum, this is arguably the prime target for reduction. However, addressing the quality issue does come with its own challenges.
For the most part, quality is seen as a quantity issue. We see overprovision of services driven by our current reimbursement model, underuse or under-treatment of chronic conditions, such as blood pressure and then there is misuse which stem from medical errors or adverse events. As a result of this, it is quite obvious that medicine is not driven by science alone but by policy, reimbursement methods, stakeholder interests and supplier induced