With all the talk of financing and mandates and public options, it's important to make sure the essentials -- that patients are helped, not harmed, by health care -- don't get overlooked. Consumers Union's Safe Patient Project held a daylong event here in DC today to help us keep that in mind.

Roughly 100,000 patients die a year from medical errors and about another 100,000 die of infections acquired in health care settings. "The status quo is not acceptable," Art Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers, told the forum.

Consumers Union last May marked the 10th anniversary of the Institute of Medicine's landmark "To Err is Human Report" with a report of its own called "To Err is Human - To Delay is Deadly" (Here's what we wrote about it at the time). The bottom line: not a lot of progress.

The event today highlighted some achievements; the health reform legislation does take some important steps to improve safety and quality. It also sheds a rather depressing light on how much remains to be done.

On the plus side, the House bill has new requirements for hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers to report infections, and the infection rates will be made public. The Medicare policy of not paying hospitals for treating certain avoidable infections will be extended to Medicaid. Both the House and Senate bills start to address high hospital readmissions (often avoidable when care is optimal), and both include an array of test programs and studies designed to improve care quality.

But safety advocates have set the bar higher for transparency -- they want public reporting of medical errors, not just infections, publicly accessible quality data banks, more safety training for doctors and nurses. And they are still waiting.

The CU event also showcased some excellent reporting on patient safety. The Pro Publica series by Charlie Ornstein and Tracy Weber on incompetent -- make that dangerous, nurses -- staying on the job in California got a fair amount of attention, but if you missed it, here's your chance. (Read the follow up reports too.) And the Hearst papers have an ambitious national reporting project called Dead by Mistake, and it's pretty shocking. Among the conclusions: in the decade since the IoM report, as many as two million Americans have died of preventable medical mistakes. And too often, health care providers have responded with secrecy, not transparency. And that in many ways, the problems are just getting worse.