Health Care: Tort Retort
Democrats have been dismissive toward one of the GOP suggestions for health care: legal reforms to reduce medical-malpractice lawsuits. Republicans contend such lawsuits drive up the cost of health care by making malpractice insurance crushingly expensive, and by encouraging defensive medicine. Defensive medicine occurs when a doctor is 99.9 percent sure you have a case of the sniffles, not a brain tumor, but she orders up an MRI anyway so that, if you ever decide to sue her, she will have proof that she did everything humanly possible to keep you healthy.
Democrats contend malpractice-insurance costs and defensive medicine add little to the total health care bill. But new research by the Congressional Budget Office says past estimates of the savings from malpractice reform fall woefully short. In a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, the head of the CBO says malpractice reform could save $54 billion over the next decade, 10 times as much as previously thought. It would do so both by lowering insurance premiums and by reducing unnecessary procedures and tests.
In the overall scheme, $54 billion is not a lot of money. It amounts to only one-half of 1 percent of total care spending. But if it is not the seismic shift Republicans would have it be, neither is it so insignificant as the trial-lawyer lobby would suggest. Tort reform should remain a part of the discussion.
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You just answered your own question, and then came to a contradictory conclusion. Yes, $54 is a lot of money by itself, but not by comparison. Half of 1 percent is not going to achieve the savings needed to reduce health care costs. So stop talking about it in the same sentence. Stopping frivolous law suits is good, but it is not an alternative to the public option.
This is not about saving money or better care or quality medicine. It is a huge government power grab.
Big Government Marxists need their big donors such as the ABA. Those who seek to control every aspect of your lives are not interested in cost cutting.
... and why isn’t it? Why ‘pooh-pooh’ a mere $54 billion in savings? Given the government’s track record on cost-estimate predictions, who’s to say what the eventual savings would be? We’ll never know because it is not even on the table. We dismiss tort reform out of hand, but fall all over ourselves accepting predictions of ‘savings’ from gutting Medicare. The bottom line is equity and ethics have nothing to do with what is driving this whole debate. It is about special interests - like lawyers - protecting their turf. Nothing good will come out of this whole process because it is not in the best interest of the people, but the best interests of the SPECIAL interests.
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