Is Obama serious about medical malpractice reform?

Or is it a red herring?

President Obama is making a much-ballyhooed address to the American Medical Association today (and will be live-Tweeted over at MedPage Today), and perhaps not coincidentally, there’s a piece in today’s New York Times saying that Obama himself is one of the few supporters willing to address the issue of malpractice reform.

According to the piece, “In closed-door talks, Mr. Obama has been making the case that reducing malpractice lawsuits — a goal of many doctors and Republicans — can help drive down health care costs, and should be considered as part of any health care overhaul, according to lawmakers of both parties, as well as A.M.A. officials.”

If there’s one viable crumb to throw along physicians’ way, it’s malpractice reform. As I’ve mentioned before, the AMA’s stance of tying adherence to evidence-based medicine to liability protection is a smart one, and a view that will be better accepted than hard malpractice caps. After all, if policy experts want doctors to change their behavior, removing the threat of a baseless lawsuit is a good way of doing so.

Of course, this needs to be paired with reimbursement reform, which I suspect, won’t go over as well with the AMA delegates. But if the President is going to get their attention, supporting malpractice reform is the best way to do so.

Update:
Thanks to Forbes for quoting this blog entry in their piece, Will Doctors Buy ObamaCare?

Comments

Matt
How is the President going to reform (is there a more meaningless word without details) what is essentially a state law issue? I realize the tenets of federalism aren’t in vogue much these days, but does anyone really think the states aren’t going to object to what are essentially person on person negligence cases being federalized?
Unless you mean “reform” in the sense of universal healthcare taking over the whole system and some kind of no fault provision. Physicians need to think carefully before making this Faustian bargain when the prime beneficiaries will be their liability carriers, not them: “But one Republican who met with Mr. Obama in April recalled that the president said he was willing to go against his party to get medical malpractice reforms into a health bill — but that he would expect Republican support for the legislation if he did so.”
skepticus
Doctors, You are status obsessed idiots. It’s clear that Obama’s public option will morph into nationalized medicine. The public option will grow and grow until there will be NO more private insurance to subsidize the niggardly government reimbursements. The government will set your salary.
HOWEVER, you’ll go along with it–you’ll destroy your own profession– provided you get relief on med mal practice premia, which represents a piddling portion of yr costs. But, medmal does represent a non-doctor encrouchment on your status. Hmmm . . . you’d rather be functionaries in a Soviet-style medical regime than be independent providers, as long as your status is intact. Sick and bizarre!
SmartDoc
I agree with “Matt,” who correctly points out that this is a state, not a federal issue. Obama will do nothing, because Obama can DO nothing as a federal official.
I cannot make heads or tails out of “skepticus”‘ ravings.
Doc99
@skepticus – Malpractice premiums are not chump change for Obstetricians or Neurosurgeons in NY, Fl, etc … Rising malpractice premiums and declining revenue stream is not a winning business model.
Matt
How much are they as a percentage of overhead on average?
Supremacy Claus
There is 2% in insurance cost. There is 10% defensive medicine. There is 20% spent on worthless end of life care that tortures dying old people, solely motivated by a need to protect oneself from litigious, scapegoating, greedy, low life family members. There is at least 20% for unproven, gold plated worthless regulation and accreditation standards. There is 10% overhead for insurance disputes and billing. There is the cost of medical errors. Every medical error is caused by the lawyer. Instead of thorough investigations and system changes to prevent them, errors are covered up because they will take down the entity when lawyers get a hold of the reports. There is the retention of incompetent, unethical, and dangerous staff, costing another 5%, because employment lawyers would destroy the place if they were fired.
Get rid of the pestiliential land pirate, and health cost would be 50% lower, have higher quality, with errors nearly gone. And, you would have enough left to buy the uninsured top of the line executive grade health insurance.
Matt
“Every medical error is caused by the lawyer. ”
Interesting statement. I have personally worked on two cases and perhaps you can share with me how the lawyer caused them. One in which a tube was inserted in the urethra and was blown up while still in the shaft, causing extensive bleeding and excruciating pain. The second involved a surgeon who performed a tubal ligation without the consent of the patient, or her family, despite the fact that they were right outside the door. An emergency you might think, yet if it was the surgeon did not see fit to make any mention of the surgery in the records or to the family afterwards. It was only 30 days later, when word started to leak out about what happened, that the records were “amended” and the patient was informed.
So what did the lawyers do to cause those?
Susan H
Personal injury lawyers are like mortgage loan originators in the ’90s…there is only vast financial incentive to create business, and no meaningful deterrent for misrepresenting facts on application for business.
Can anybody name a single successful(that is, having recovered a damage award of cost breakeven) malicious prosecution or abuse of process lawsuit by a doc against a lawyer?
Can anybody cite case law of legal malpractice which awarded monetary compensation for pain and sufffering or loss of consortium?
Doctors need to make public aware of the bizarre protections attorneys enjoy, as compared to doctors who are victims with no recourse.
Supremacy Claus
Matt: The proper response to those errors would be a thorough investigation by insiders and a redesign of procedure to prevent them. If a solution cannot be found immediately, then shut the entire section down. This remedy will generate an explosion of creativity in the administrators. I guarantee, the solutions and the preventions will be found.
Today, such investigation would be subject to discovery, and would be an admission against interest, an exception to the hearsay exclusion rule. It would take out the institutions. Health institutions have a duty to their patients to stay alive, not to fund the third business jet of the land pirate.
Supremacy Claus
Susan: All lawyer self-dealt immunities are lawless. They grow the profession in an unauthorized, stealthy, bad faith form of industrial policy. As torts are designed to substitute for violent self-help, so immunity justifies it.
Supremacy Claus
Do the states receive federal funds for health insurance?
The federal government can condition further funding on the state’s passage of a statute enacting medmal reform. The analogy is to the highway funds. If you want them, change the state limit to a specific amount, make 21 the legal drinking age, if you want highway funds.

Is Obama serious about medical malpractice reform?

Related Stories

More in Policy

Comments

Site

Channels

Subscribe

Related Stories

More in Policy

Comments

Site

Channels