I don't know if the national Democratic party gets it but the Maryland Democrats definitely do. The Republicans and their insurance company cronies have spent the past 50 years trying to convince people that there is a "crisis" in malpractice insurance premiums and, more importantly from their point of view, that injured patients and their greedy lawyers are to blame. Their prescription for this "crisis" is so called "tort reform", which contains a host of limitations on the legal system, many of which have no conceivable relationship to malpractice premiums, and not one direct restriction on what malpractice insurers can and cannot do. The Maryland Democrats have effectively fought back by coming up with some real, populist reforms designed to really fix any medical malpractice crisis that may exist and make the Democrats the real party of reform on this issue. To find out more, look below the fold.
For many years, Democrats have played into Republican hands on issues like "tort reform" by simply killing Republican "reform" packages without any meaningful consideration of whether a crisis truly existed, and without proposing our own programs if there really is a crisis. This leaves the Republicans with an issue for the election trail, and it leaves the phony impression that Republicans are the party of reform. But the Maryland Democrats knew better. They tried to study the problem to determine whether a crisis existed at all, and whether trial lawyers were really at fault. When insurance companies resisted these attempts, and when it became clear that any crisis was at least as much the fault of the insurance companies, the Democrats came up with their own "reform package" which taxed HMOs and used the proceeds of the tax to reimburse doctors for their malpractice premiums. This true reform also creates a "people's counsel" with the power to advocate for people against insurance companies and to intervene to determine whether particular malpractice rate increases are necessary. The Democrats' bill also places reasonable limits on lawsuits. In short, this reform package was designed to address a real problem in a real way, and has the added benefit of making the Democrats the reformers and the Republicans the resisters.
Note today's headline in the Washington Post: "Ehrlich Vetoes Malpractice Reform Bill" This headline says it all, since the Republicans are now resisting malpratice reforms even though, as the story notes, "The Maryland State Medical Society, which represents more than 7,000 doctors, and the Maryland Hospital Association, which represents about 50 facilities, had urged Ehrlich to allow the bill to become law." In other words, we're the party trying to help doctors, and they're the party stubbornly sticking to their stupid proposal, which punishes only the most deserving cases, and which at best indirectly addresses the problem of malpractice premiums while allowing insurance companies to keep premiums high and pocket the lawsuit savings if that's what they choose to do. Even worse, many Republican proposals are designed to funnel cases into federal courts, even though these same Republicans have spent years and years trying to convince people that the federal courts ought to butt out of the states' business. In other words, their marching principle on "tort reform" is: State courts, good enough for the death penalty, but not good enough for tort cases. It really is the height of hypocrisy.
Democrats need to steal back the mantle of reform on a host of issues like this, since we are the natural reform party anyway. Republican "reform" proposals like "tort reform" are generally born from manufactured crises, which never include a study of the actual problem and its causes, and the solutions are generally cynical, lousy policy ideas, designed to throw bones to their corporate cronies. We can do better and the Maryland Democrats have. As they showed, we're the only party that actually gives a damn about whether family doctors can stay in business. And, unlike the Republicans, we don't give a damn whether the insurance companies like our policies. Not that we should be anti-insurance companies, but a little public oversight is always a good thing for any industry, as Teddy Roosevelt showed us long ago. The good companies will welcome the scrutiny and prosper anyway, the bad ones will be rightly burned by the sunlight, and doctors and patients will be the big winners. The Maryland Dems are apparently going to override the veto and make this bill law. We should follow their lead nationally.