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willbeurdaddy -> RE: What the hell just happened? (10/22/2009 11:24:47 AM)
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ORIGINAL: rulemylife
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ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam
Um folks... the thread is about health care and the costs thereof. I find it unfortunate that noone in is pushing tort reform. with a large percentage of every health care dollar ending up in the pocket of an attorney somewhere. I dont have a problem with someone making a good living, but a guy with 7 years of college making $1000+ / hour while his client or clients that he is supposed to be acting in the best interest of based on the fiduciary relationship getting peanuts? c'moooooooon folks. it isnt about someone getting what they are owed for their pain and suffering. It is ALL about lining the pockets of the attorneys.
Tort Reform Unlikely to Cut Health Care Costs
So far Republicans have mostly focused on tearing apart any reform with a role for the federal government, portraying it as the government dictating how long old people get to live. But an undercurrent of those complaints is the insistence of doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and ideological conservatives that medical malpractice claims are out of control and a leading cause of rising health care costs.
The health economists and independent legal experts who study the issue, however, don’t believe that’s true. They say that malpractice liability costs are a small fraction of the spiraling costs of the U.S. health care system, and that the medical errors that malpractice liability tries to prevent are themselves a huge cost– both to the injured patients and to the health care system as a whole.
“It’s really just a distraction,” said Tom Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of “The Medical Malpractice Myth.” “If you were to eliminate medical malpractice liability, even forgetting the negative consequences that would have for safety, accountability, and responsiveness, maybe we’d be talking about 1.5 percent of health care costs. So we’re not talking about real money. It’s small relative to the out-of-control cost of health care.”
An "economist" who should be fired from a well respected institution for obfuscation. The fiction of the 1.5% has been debunked because it ignores the secondary impacts of avoiding law suits, and because the denominator includes costs not directly related to the provision of health care. Malpractice premiums remain the single largest expense in most medical practices.
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