I Told You So (Medical Malpractice Crisis My Ass Part II)

As anyone who follows healthcare policy in this country knows, the right wing's solution to solving the crisis of astronomically increasing health care costs comes in the form of tort reform. How many times have you heard the talking point about how "frivolous lawsuits" are driving doctors out of business, and are causing health care costs to spiral out of control? I wrote about my frustrations with these falsehoods, and the negative consequences that low income people in this state now face because of it, in an earlier post.

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Senate smartly blocked 2 bills (S 22 & S 23) that would have put a cap on non-economic damages in malpractice suits where the health care provider acted "with malicious intent to injure the claimant" or "deliberately failed to avoid unnecessary injury" (Crowley/Schuler, CQ Today, 5/8). "President" Bush's reaction?

"I am disappointed that the Senate has yet again failed to pass real medical liability reform legislation. Junk lawsuits are driving too many good doctors out of business."

The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist's reaction:

"Health care dollars should be spent on patients and not on lawyers who are abusing the system" (New York Times, 5/9).

What about health care dollars being spent on the patient, not insurance company's profits!? That's the real crisis.

Now I don't purport to have all the answers. I don't have a silver bullet to save us from our health care financing woes. However I DO know that the medical malpractice "crisis" that we hear about is nothing but a red herring.

Data recently published in Health Affairs backs me up on this one. In a piece entitled: Malpractice Premiums And Physicians’ Income: Perceptions Of A Crisis Conflict With Empirical Evidence The name kind of says it all: perceptions of a crisis.

The study uses data collected by the American Medical Association between 1970 and today. One of the authors of the study states that the American Medical Association "ignores its data when proclaiming a malpractice crisis," The study basically says that, adjusting for inflation, physician's are currently spending less on malpractice insurance than they were in 1986. That's less folks, not more, not so much more that it can be called a crisis. So why are physicians and lawmakers trying so hard to create legislation about this? Once again the author of the study provides some insight in a piece he wrote for the Louisville Courier-Journal entitled Legislative Malpractice?:

Physicians feel beleaguered by reduced fees, market competition and health insurers who second guess their work. Malpractice has become a symbol to them of everything wrong with medicine -- a convenient scapegoat. Thus, senators find an opportunity to please vocal constituents without committing government funds or their personal effort to address real problems. However, caps won't end the frustrations of medical practice, boost physician income much or increase access to health care.

And what about Mr. Bush's statement about this "crisis" driving physician's out of business? The author sheds some light on that:

AMA surveys show that the supply of physicians increased four times faster than the population from 1965 to 2000. The increase in physicians also outpaced population growth since 1995, even for physicians in high-risk specialties such as Ob/Gyn, and even in states that the AMA says have a crisis because they don't cap damage awards.

Do I think that this data will change the call to put these money grubbing trial lawyers out of business? Of course not. This is not an administration that puts much (if any) emphasis on truth. They will continue to use scare tactics to lie to the public, and I'm afraid, the public will continue to believe it.