WASHINGTON---Assistant Majority Leader Don Nickles helped pass a Patients' Bill of Rights Plus to ensure current and future generations continue to have access to the best quality health care in the world. The measure passed the Senate 53-47.

"I think we came up with a very good, very defensible package. One that's proven to make positive contributions for affordable, quality health care for all Americans," said Nickles.

"We've been working for a year and a half, meeting with health care experts trying to figure out how to improve quality health care without dramatically increasing the costs and increasing the number of the uninsured. Our goal was to implement a positive, significant improvement in health care for America--this bill does that."

Nickles chaired the seven-member Republican Task Force on Health Care Quality, which wrote the Patients Bill of Rights Plus. Providing the following new protections:

• Protects the unprotected by giving patients not protected by state law a Bill of Rights that includes guaranteed emergency room care, direct access to an OB-GYN or pediatrician and the ability to see the doctor of their choice.

• Educates consumers by requiring health plans to provide a wide range of comparative information.

• Empowers consumers by providing a timely and cost-free, independent appeals procedure for all patients to contest a denial of coverage to a doctor who makes the final decision.

• Allows patients to benefit from advanced research by prohibiting health plans from discrimination based on genetic testing.

• Improves quality by expanding research and improving distribution of information on state-of-the-art treatment to doctors around the country.

• Creates new opportunities to protect the uninsured with provisions to make health insurance more affordable and accessible.

Tonight's vote defeats a competing big-government, one-size-fits-all health plan proposal that would increase health care costs, cause Americans to lose their health insurance and put a massive federal bureaucracy between patients and their doctors.