Beats thinking.

Limited tort reform may be warranted. That said, the tort system is a critical component in protecting consumers from the power of huge corporate interests. For example, without the threat of tort, it would be extremely easy for large insurance to delay coverage for many treatments until it was too late. You don’t like it? Go find another insurance company to cover you once they deny payment.

I think the tort system, as applied to health care, needs massive reform and caps on awards and legal fees because trial lawyers –the lowest end of the legal pool– have manipulated the system into a money-changers delight. Find a cause, build a suit, litigate or threaten to litigate, reap unjust rewards… go back and repeat. Judges help by allowing juries to be sensationalized, manipulated and pandered to by special interests intent on upending the legal system.

MI-GOP is right: the real honorable Democrats who stood for more than pandering to trial lawyers would be disgusted by what their Party has become. Reforming medical mal and tort caps on judgments and fees would be a step in the right direction and wouldn’t require some new “statist regulatory” apparatus. To say otherwise is to try to pull an “Obama”… misdirect, distract from the truth, argue the inverse of reality and use your opponent’s language to seemingly disarm their argument. It’s all Saul Alinsky 101.

In essence in a free market a provider of any good or service runs three risks due to shoddy work or excessive risk taking – loss of reputation that affects business, running afoul of regulations, or the risk of losing in tort proceedings.

Each of these is subject to creating inefficiencies:
- companies and individuals spend huge sums of money in advertising to overwhealm any effect that pure reputation would have except in the cases at the margin (where someone is universally accepted as the best or worst performer in a field)
- regulations can stifle innovation and cause the waste of significant amounts of money both in affecting regulation via lobbying, and via structural inefficiencies required for documenting compliance
- the tort process siphons money out of the medical care system to be paid to lawyers and beneficiaries of large settlements, plus presumed duplicative care and testing used to “cover ones ass”

Interestingly, a vibrant functional tort system is critical to movement away from a regulatory-based statist system … if for many services you eliminate the threat of punishment via the courts for bad or incompetent behavior then the only other protection for the populace will be regulation. Any true libertarian should champion the courts as integral to the free market.

Honorable men like Scoop Jackson and DP Moynihan and Bill Fulbright must be rolling over in their graves at the thought that trial lawyers are now the preferred special interest of the modern Democrat Party. The Democrats have become the party of choice for special interests and those wishing to spread the culture of corruption beyond Washington and large urban cities. Where are the Democrat Party’s “honorable men and women” these days? Succoring at the teet of the trial lawyers with Nancy BoTox as their chief cheerleader and enabler. Disgusting.

Don’t blame the lawyers, blame the juries. Lawyers only present the case (granted, with as much spin as possible). But it’s up to a jury to weed out the trash.

Interesting. I’ve been reading just the opposite, that in fact the problem is too much actual malpractice and most cases of malpractice never spawn a lawsuit. This book excerpt makes the point about too much actual malpractice. This press release is about a study that shows that tort reform realizes very modest savings.

It seems that actual medical malpractice is the area most ripe for improvements. This would reduce the number of lawsuits and improve care. My wife has a rheumatological condition that has caused a number of complications and visits to various hospitals (about 7 or 8 over the last decade plus). The disparity in how well these hospitals handle the issue of error prevention, from excellent to utterly incompetent (at a supposedly respected university teaching hospital) is staggering.

As a physician, I can tell you that I understand the need to make changes in our health care system. Why, because it can’t be denied that it is too expensive and inefficient. No need to get into the specifics, as the purpose here is to make an analogy.

The med mal system is also inefficient and ineffective (if not openly corrupt) in states that do not have reform. It’s well documented that many more lawsuits are filed in those states than legitimate citations of malpractice justify. Society has many reasons to attempt to control this egregiously inequitable situation, and states that have made these changes show a much better balance between legitimate vs. unjustified lawsuits.

It’s not surprising that you can name a few examples of inadequate judgements resulting from limits in damages in malpractice cases. But anecdotes don’t justify continuing a process that wastes enormous resources so pervasively.

So yes, lawyers are at fault, as they lead and fund the maintenance of this inequitable system. Unfortunately, as Mr. Frum points out, their power, to the detriment of this country, remains unabated.

What I found most interesting about your article is you failed to demonstrate how lower malpractice premiums helps the patient in any way. Sure, you mentioned lower cost for the doctor and more doctors per capita, but what real benefit has a single patient seen? First, I know of no one who has had a problem actually finding a doctor to go to. The number of doctors isn’t the issue. So far as the “savings,” we are helping doctors and insurance companies save money because neither are in fear of having to pay out on a legitimate claim to any real degree. However, co-pays have not gone down, cash-paid office visits haven’t gotten cheaper, and the quality of healthcare hasn’t improved.

So we’ve made sure the legitimate claims won’t be paid at a level they should be (think life-long care needed in the aftermath of a negligent surgery accident), and we’ve rewarded the negligent doctor by lowering his premiums, and the insurance company by lowering their payout liability. Meanwhile, the patient still pays the same costs (or more, as healthcare costs increase), still has to wait weeks for an appointment (regardless of how many new doctors flock to the state), and still run the risk of a surgery going bad. Only now they won’t be able to recover the money necessary to make sure someone wipes their nose for the rest of their life.

Sure, the lawyers are to blame for this.