Edit: $1.55 trillion, not $1.15 trillion.
It looks like Bush lied at least once and got horribly confused during his 30-second response.
"Defensive medicine costs $60B-$100B"
Wrong. Here's an HTMLized version of a document from factcheck.org
Link
A 2003 report issued by the assistant secretary of HHS made that claim, which appeared in "a 1996 paper by Stanford economists Daniel P. Kessler and Mark McClellan. McClellan - who is both an economist and a physician - served more recently as President Bush's senior White House policy director for health care, and is now the head of the Food and Drug Administration."
The report and Bush ignore three other studies from the same decade, two cited by Congressional investigators.
A 1990 study by the Harvard University School of Public Health "did not find a strong relationship between the threat of litigation and medical costs," CBO said. And a 1999 study in the Journal of Health Economics found only tiny savings - less than three-tenths of one percent - when studying the cost of Caesarian sections in states with limits on lawsuits, compared to states without limits.
Finally, a 1994 study by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment found some added costs (under $54 million total) due to defensive radiology in children with head injuries and defensive Caesarian sections in certain women with difficult pregnancies. But the OTA study concluded: "it is impossible in the final analysis to draw any conclusions about the overall extent or cost of defensive medicine."
At any rate, Bush's dubious $60B to $100B in defensive medicine represents, at worst, 6.5% of the $1.55 trillion spent for health care in America.
Bush also excoriated Kerry for spending 20 years in the Senate without doing anything about health care. In the next sentence, he claimed that Kerry sponsored 300 bills on health care, of which five passed.
Of course Kerry only enjoyed a Democratic President and Congress for two of his twenty years, which might explain the low hit rate. Sponsoring 300 bills is hardly ignoring an issue.
Kerry claims to have worked on a more modest 56 bills and some role in the authorship of the bill that expanded Medicare to children.
