Will Obama deficit plan include malpractice reform?
As I have written, malpractice lawsuits and malpractice-avoidance costs are not a major contributor to soaring health costs. But they are a contributor -- 2 percent of health-care costs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And of course they are a hobby-horse of the right.
So if Obama wants to make his deficit-reducton plan bipartisan, he'll have to make a pass at tort reform. This is from the 2010 state of the union speech: “I’m willing to look at other ideas to bring down costs, including one that Republicans suggested last year: medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits."
Serious and fair reform would start with imposing a federal ban on joint and several liability, in which somebody or some company can be 10 percent at fault for harm suffered by the plaintiff but liable for 100 percent of the damages awarded. From a 2009 letter from CBO to Sen. Orrin Hatch:
The two most common ways of imposing limits on liability are to shorten the statute of limitations on malpractice claims and to change the rules regarding joint-and-several liability. The principle of joint-and-several liability allows a claimant to recover the entire amount of a damage award from any one of the parties found to be responsible for an injury, regardless of the party’s degree of responsibility for that injury. Replacing jointand- several liability with a “fair-share” rule would limit each defendant’s financial liability to his or her percentage share of responsibility for the injury.
Comments
What can we learn about medical professional liability from prior economic downturns? http://www.healthcaretownhall.com/?p=3296
Posted by: Jeremy Engdahl-Johnson | April 12, 2011 6:45 PM
I have a hard time believing that they amount to only 2% of heathcare costs.
Perhaps the direct costs amount to 2%, but what about all the extra tests, the time spent waiting and referring people to specialists, and all the other little things doctors do before they actually get down to business these days? I'm sure those amount to much more than 2%...
Posted by: John J. Walters | April 13, 2011 9:35 AM
The real cost problem with malpractice isn't lawsuits; it is malpractice itself. The best way to reduce malpractice costs is to reduce malpractice in the first place. Tort reform doesn't lower the cost of malpractice; it just shifts more of it to the victims, their health insurers, and the tax payers from the physicians who commit malpractice and their insurers.
In Maryland over the last 20 years only about 1.7 percent of physicians were responsible for over half of all the money paid out for malpractice, and most of this group had more than one payment. Yet only about 12 percent of this group responsible for the bulk of the problem had any action taken against their license and only about 4 percent of them had any hospital peer review action.
Rather than shifting even more of the cost of malpractice to the victims, maybe we should get the licensing board and the hospital peer reviewers to take action to protect the public from the few physicians who are responsible for most of the problem. That would not only save money, it would save lives, too.
Posted by: Robert Oshel | April 13, 2011 12:09 PM