With all the debate over health care, very little is said about a key ingredient in its high costs, and that is lawsuits against medical care providers. It’s difficult to turn on the TV for any length of time without hearing commercials from trial lawyers encouraging the public to sue for one thing after another. “It won’t cost you a penny if you lose.”
Trial lawyers are truly the scum of the earth, and they are very much to blame for higher health care costs. Want health care reform? Start with the John Edwards' of the country, the true villains, and remember that liberals in Congress are in bed with them. Perhaps if individuals had to pay their own legal bills before launching a lawsuit, people would not be so greedy and sue-happy.
Read about how lawsuits are impacting our healthcare system from Red State:
One Reason Our Healthcare System is in a Mess: Trial Lawyers
There really are problems with our healthcare system, but Obama isn't addressing any of it.
“OK, my headline is admittedly too simplistic. In fact, the whole medical malpractice milieu is sorely in need of a fix. We have unnecessarily large awards to aggrieved patients, crushing insurance costs to doctors to cover malpractice, a situation where defensive medicine drives up costs, and an entire industry of lawyers whose job it is, apparently, to rape the system and cause it to be burdensome for all of us. On top of that, we have a national party in the Democrats assisting these very destructive lawyers to do just that. This is a part of our medical system that truly needs reform.
We can start by getting Democrats to stop doing everything they can to bend over backwards for the John Edwards’ of this world — ambulance chasers extraordinaire. Democrats are the reason this has gotten so bad. And imagine, we are trusting to Democrats to ‘fix’ what they, themselves broke with the greedy assistance of the trial lawyers.
Last month, I wondered aloud if Obama was going to cut these medical vultures off at the knees? I asked if Obamacare would mean that medical malpractice law will take a hit?
‘Currently doctors pay outrageous premiums for malpractice insurance. A CBS report from 2004, for instance, revealed that some OB-GYNs then paid as much as $90,000 a year for malpractice insurance. Today it is likely closer to $200,000. These outrageous premiums mean that a doctor must take in something like $400,000 a year to be able to afford the insurance premiums and still make a living worth going through the decades of training and schooling required to become a doctor.’
Others are also wondering about Obama’s plans for medical malpractice reform. But it doesn’t look like Obama is really much interested in telling his trial lawyer backers to tone it down. There won’t be any ‘shared sacrifice’ for trial lawyers if Obama has any say in the matter.
Richard Epstein also tackled this topic
in The Wall Street Journal on June 30. Epstein compared our medical malpractice arena to that of other countries and the results prove that our trial lawyers and their Democratic Party patrons have created a mess for US in comparison.
‘Litigation in the U.S. has at least four distinctive procedural features that drive up malpractice costs. The first is jury trials, which can veer out of control and in any case introduce significant uncertainty. The second is the contingency-fee system, which allows well-heeled lawyers to self-finance litigation. The third is the rule that makes each side bear its own costs. This induces riskier lawsuits than are undertaken in most other countries, such as Canada, England and most of Europe, where the loser pays the legal costs of the winner. The fourth is extensive pretrial discovery outside the direct supervision of judges, which occurs far more readily here than elsewhere.’
Epstein identifies several other problems with our legal practices re medical malpractice and ends up finding that we burden ourselves with waste and abuse beyond measure.
‘A study led by David Studdert published in the 2006 New England Journal of Medicine concluded that the administrative expenses of the malpractice system were “exorbitant.” And worse, it found errors in jury verdicts in about a quarter of the litigated cases. Juries denied compensation properly due in 16% of the cases, and awarded it about 10% of the time when it was unwarranted. These error rates don’t include damage awards set at improper levels.’
And here is one where Canada does do a far better job than we do. Epstein tells us that according to a 1992 study by Donald Dewees and Michael Trebilcock in the Osgood Hall Law Journal, Canada’s medical malpractice caseload was about the same as that of the U.S., but they incur about 10% of the total cost of ours. This is a travesty.
Epstein has several suggested correctives to our system, but he is reticent, it seems, to put the blame where it belongs: the Democrat Party. It is they who’ve passed laws that coddle trial lawyers looking for big payoffs and get rich quick schemes. And, as I said, we are unfortunate enough that it is they that folks are looking to for a healthcare fix.
For Democrats, with the trial lawyer backers in tow, there will be no fix of medical malpractice unless voters force the issue. If Barack Obama truly wanted reform, a major part of his healthcare policies would revolve around fixing the medical malpractice system we are currently suffering under.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama is not interested in reform. He only wants power.”
8 comments:
I agree that excessive awards are a part of the problem, but what's the solution? A cap on damages? That's all well and good in the abstract, but it's a lot tougher to implement. If you lost a limb -- or a loved one -- due to a doctor's malpractice, what's it worth? You want to be the one to put a maximum price on a life?
Now, one potential reform might be to initiate a "loser pays" scenario re: legal fees. That might inhibit frivolous claims... but it might also inhibit a lot of legitimate claims, too. Say I have a pretty good case of medical malpractice, damn near a slam-dunk case. But my lawyer warns me, the doctor has a whole regiment of high-priced lawyers working his side of the case, and they charge $500 an hour, and while I ought to win, and probably will win, my lawyer can't guarantee it. I might lose. And I might be liable for a million dollars in legal fees if I do. And I don't have a million dollars. So I should drop my lawsuit and swallow all my damages, just so there's no chance of the doctor screwing me again, this time by paying his legal fees?
It's far more complex than simply claiming that John Edwards-type ambulance chasers need to be eliminated.
And your intro, where you claim TV ads for these trial lawyers claim "It won't cost you a penny if you lose"? And that the cure might be to make people pay their own legal bills before launching a lawsuit? Litigants DO have to pay court costs, expert witness fees, etc., whether they win or they lose. It may not cost them a penny in LAWYER FEES if they don't win (meaning payment for the lawyer's time, for which he takes a contingency % if he wins) but they are responsible for all other costs. And that can be several thousand dollars.
Reform is needed, all right, but it's not simply done. If it were THAT simple, it would have been done long ago.
Massive immigration is an even bigger problem. Most of the new immigrants are unskilled and do not pay their medical bills. These people increase the demand of medical services, while the supply of qualified medical personel are not increasing as quickly. Simple supply and demand.
Want to reduce the costs of healthcare? Stop importing unskilled workers.
As usual, government is the cause of the problem now tells us that they have a solution for the problems that they created.
Gosh, I didn't know that the government imported workers, skilled or unskilled!
What causes workers to come over the border, legally and illegally, is the fact that American businesses will hire them at lower wages than they can employ American workers.
If anybody "imports" workers, it's the free enterprise system, not the government. And, gosh, the government shouldn't stand in the way of what the free enterprise system wants, should it?
I think it would help if punative damages were paid to the government rather than the defendant. (Of course, actual damages would still be paid to the defendant in restitution.) This would cut down on some of the petty lawsuits, since the defendant could only receive payment for damages. The get-rich-quick incentive would be removed.
The government isn't the victim, so why should the government get punitive damages? And on what constitutional basis would you be staking THAT claim???? Do we really want to set up a situation where the government is coming into court to argue for high punitives in a civil case, when the government isn't even a party to the lawsuit? And if the government can't make that argument (and it can't) who would EVER make the argument for punitives? What plaintiff, or what plaintiff's lawyer, wouold spend the time and energy to make an argument for punitives if the goevrnment is the beneficiary? Answer: few, if any. All that would do is virtually ensure that punitives are never sought nor awarded.
On the surface, it might seem like a great way to augment the national treasury's coffers without raising taxes, but it wouldn't and couldn't be made to work.
Maybe you didn't understand my point. It's my understanding that a jury can award restitution (paying for what you stole or broke or maybe for pain and suffering) and punitive damages (a punishment for wrongdoing). If the victim is repaid, then I would say that the victim has received what he deserves. Allowing the plaintiff to receive the punitive damages on top of the restitutions which he rightfully deserves only creates a monetary incentive to file frivolous lawsuits.
"What plaintiff, or what plaintiff's lawyer, wouold spend the time and energy to make an argument for punitives if the goevrnment is the beneficiary? Answer: few, if any. All that would do is virtually ensure that punitives are never sought nor awarded."
Yes, that's exactly I suggested giving the punitive damages to somebody besides the plaintiff. (Of course, restitutions would still be paid.)
Punitives aren't usually awarded; they're not even ALLOWED to be awarded in most cases. It's only really used in cases where the defendant has a history of engaging in tortious actions with no regard to the outcome. Like Ford Motor Co. and the Pinto, when Ford intentionally sold flawed Pintos with gas tanks that would explode in any rear-end collision over 3 mph. Ford's lawyers told corporate management that it would be cheaper to simply pay off victims than it would be to redesign the car to make it safe. In that kind of case, you take a big stick of punitives and whack the bad guys over the head, so that they clearly get the message "We don't like your math, so we're going to add an X Facotr (punitives) to remind you that this really isn't the way you're supposed to conduct yourself in our society."
Like I said, punitives are rarely awarded and, even when a jury is allowed to award them, the judge often lowers the amount that the jury OKs as punitives. It's just that te judge lowering the punitives happens weeks or months down the road, after the verdict, so it doesn't make news.
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