WASHINGTON -- During the first month of the new congressional session, debate has centered on changes to Social Security, but Pennsylvania Rep. Tim Murphy is urging that more attention be paid to what he sees as a far more immediate problem for most Americans: health care.

U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy

Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair, a psychologist and co-chairman of the 21st Century Health Care Caucus, has been giving a weekly series of speeches on the House floor, asking colleagues to focus less on scaling back care to save money and more on reducing medical errors, which would both reduce costs and protect patients.

"This is the key issue," he said. "During campaign time, people kept saying: 'It's terrorism, it's Iraq.' I said, 'It's health care.' ... We have to set a major shift and a long-term plan for what we're doing here, and not just say, 'O.K., what Band-Aid can we put on it this year,' because that doesn't help Americans."

This session, Murphy is working with the bipartisan health caucus on legislation that would create incentives for hospitals and doctors to use electronic systems for maintaining health records, and he is highlighting aspects of Pittsburgh's health care system as his model.

He said Congress ought to set a national goal of zero medical errors. Some 44,000 to 98,000 people die each year because of medical mistakes, according to a 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. The report found that more people die each year from prescription errors -- about 7,000 -- than from workplace injuries.

Murphy hopes to encourage health care providers to adopt systems that would track every aspect of a patient's care -- from a first physical through every test and X-ray, including films of surgical procedures. He cites the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's "eRecord" system as one of the nation's best examples.

President Bush mentioned electronic record-keeping in his State of the Union address earlier this month and requested $125 million in his 2006 budget to develop systems for the exchange of electronic health records.

Murphy hopes to win support in Congress for more tax incentives and grants for hospitals that agree to adopt electronic systems. He also is working on a national standard, so that such systems protect patient privacy and provide incentives for doctors to prescribe drugs electronically, which can help reduce drug interaction errors.

Electronic prescriptions could create useful databases as well, he said. If a drug found to increase the risk of heart attacks is recalled, for example, doctors could instantly cross-reference patients who had received the medicine with those known to have heart conditions.

"This is the other part of medical liability reform," Murphy said. "This is where we save the lives and the money. ... This is the common ground where trial attorneys and physicians will agree we need to solve this problem."

He also plans to advocate full funding of the president's initiative to increase the number of community health centers that serve counties with high numbers of uninsured and underinsured patients.

The White House has requested $2 billion for community health centers in 2006, an increase of $304 million from this fiscal year. Bush made a commitment to serve an additional 6.1 million patients by 2006. This year, according to budget documents, the administration will be about 64 percent of the way toward achieving that goal.

Community health centers now serve more than 14 million people, with about 412,000 of them in Pennsylvania, according to 2003 estimates by the National Association of Community Health Centers.

Despite Bush's setting a goal in his State of the Union address of creating a community health center in every poor county, his administration set aside only $26 million in 2006 for 40 new centers in high-poverty areas. Murphy would like to see more funding and is drafting legislation that would provide incentives to doctors and nurses who volunteer their time at federally approved health centers.

He said he plans to spend more than 60 percent of his time in Congress working on health care issues. When he served in Pennsylvania's General Assembly from 1997 to 2002, Murphy authored a patient's bill of rights and worked on legislation that diverted about 20 percent of the money from the tobacco settlement into medical research.