Health care reform: "The root of the problem is obvious"

Paul Ostin:

The answer lies in eliminating all of the fraudulent law suits filed every day by money-hungry lawyers who are completely destroying the medical system. As lawyers sue doctors, malpractice insurance premiums increase. The number of personal injury litigations has steadily increased at a rate of 12% since 1975 . . .
. . . Seeing the direct correlation between health care cost and the cost of medical malpractice insurance for doctors (driven up by law suits), the root of the problem is obvious. This must be attacked before anything else. If Senator Kennedy and Governor Schwarzenegger want to see real progress, their plans must be disregarded and tort abuse must be solved first.

Comments

Anonymous
“The number of personal injury litigations has steadily increased at a rate of 12% since 1975 . . .”
Uhh, not recently. The number of tort cases has been on a steady decline for over a decade, according to the National Center for State Courts.
“Seeing the direct correlation between health care cost and the cost of medical malpractice insurance for doctors (driven up by law suits), the root of the problem is obvious.”
What direct correlation? Healthcare costs increase at the same rates in states with and without “reform”. Healthcare is no cheaper in California than it is in a state without draconian “reforms”.
Do people not fact check anymore?
Elliott
Ok. I clicked through and boy was I sorry. I knew that I would see bad information and cra**y logic, but this combination which jumped right out at me as I skimmed caused me to stop reading anything more from this tool. He contends that what’s driving up healthcare costs is the malpractice awards which, in the main, are increasing because malpractice awards cover medical costs. Now this might make sense if there was some kind of spiral upwards going on, BUT malpractice awards are increasing at a SLOWER pace than general medical costs so the argument utterly fails. Of course, Kevin will publish anything that agrees with him no matter how specious the logic.
Anonymous
I agree with the above posters that the two effects are not necessarily correlated. If you break down the overall costs of healthcare today, expenses towards legal coverage is not that big (I think around 10%) compared to the huge burden, which is long-term managed care (>30%, I believe). Folks are getting older and living longer, which requires nursing homes and expensive drugs. We should really focus more on addressing end-of-life care if we want to make any significant impact against the rising costs of healthcare.
Anonymous
um out in Cali there is the jury award cap… insurance rates keep going up
the problem: actuaries can game the system because there is rigid supply ctrl and no transparency in the medical cartel
soln: open up accreditation, ie if u pass the state test ur in. Create tiered insurance practices- ur success rate is X% rate as -x or -2x etc.
as long as medicine is practiced as opaque cartel, with fixed provider pool (each w/ equal risk), it is very very easy for FSAs create rigid models with max rate returns.
ps: there r many benefits to free markdt
Anonymous
um out in Cali there is the jury award cap… insurance rates keep going up
the problem: actuaries can game the system because there is rigid supply ctrl and no transparency in the medical cartel
soln: open up accreditation, ie if u pass the state test ur in. Create tiered insurance practices- ur success rate is X% rate as -x or -2x etc.
as long as medicine is practiced as opaque cartel, with fixed provider pool (each w/ equal risk), it is very very easy for FSAs create rigid models with max rate returns.
ps: there r many benefits to free markdt
Anonymous
um out in Cali there is the jury award cap… insurance rates keep going up
the problem: actuaries can game the system because there is rigid supply ctrl and no transparency in the medical cartel
soln: open up accreditation, ie if u pass the state test ur in. Create tiered insurance practices- ur success rate is X% rate as -x or -2x etc.
as long as medicine is practiced as opaque cartel, with fixed provider pool (each w/ equal risk), it is very very easy for FSAs create rigid models with max rate returns.
ps: there r many benefits to free markdt
Redhawk
Of course, actual malpractice couldn’t possibly have anything to do with malpractice costs, as malpractice is merely a figment of the uninformed public’s imagination. Those 200,000 people who die every year in the US due to medical errors and fatal reactions to drugs are isolated incidents and do not in any way reflect on the quality of medical care. No, malpractice suits can only be the result of ficititious injuries engineered by litigious patients and the greedy lawyers who represent them.
Anonymous
Redhawk,
I know you really love the bogus conclusions of that IOM study. But sorry it just is not true. I have practiced medicine for 10 years in a high risk specialty seeing nearly 5000 patients annually. I don’t think I can ever recall a single case that I know of (mine and others) where an error directly lead to someones death. I know of cases where a logical error was made based upon inconclusive information and logical assumptions.

Health care reform: "The root of the problem is obvious"

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