We all know the RNC is bankrupt of ideas and their position on health care is no different than the rest of the Republican agenda. They haven't anything constructive to contribute to the pursuit of solutions, so they are relying on obstruction and fear mongering.
One highly effective Republican meme is to blame "Frivolous law Suits" as a primary cause for out of control, rising health care costs (aka The Malpractice Crisis). The problem with this position is that it's a myth, but that has never stopped the conservative mind set before. Republicans will pass laws to limit damage awards, but won't stop malpractice insurers from price gouging.
No health care provider likes to talk about medical mistakes, but they happen and people die from them. Others live with the results of medical errors with a seriously impaired quality of life. These victims deserve redress for the wrongs done to them.
It's important to draw a distinction between a SLAPP law suit, which Republican interests know how to use very well, and a legitimate claim of wrong doing. This public service announcement talks about SLAPP suits.
Please note, the research sited in the ad states: "83% of Americans say frivolous law suits are a serious problem". Just because we say it, doesn't make it a fact. The MSM feeds this perception every time they feature a frivolous law suit, so the public now thinks that most liability suits are frivolous and "something must be done to stop it". Now, anyone who's watched an episode of and Boston Legal knows a frivolous law suit when they see one, but that show is fiction and so is the idea that most medical malpractice law suits are meritless and millions of people are getting rich from meritless law suits. Do we need to protect Dry cleaners from $10 million dollar law suits over a pair of pants? That's a no brainer, but how do you compensate someone for MRSA? Now that MRSA is labeled a "never event" and non-payable by most insurance; how does a patient pay for treatment without suing for it?
Among the health care cuts on the RNC web page, buried fairly far down the list, is reducing your ability to sue health care providers. The RNC frames it as "Protect Good Healthcare Providers From Frivolous Law Suits". To assume most malpractice cases are frivolous is wrong.
An investigation by the West Virginia Sunday Gazette-Mail revealed that just 40 doctors were responsible for more than one-fourth of the 2,300 cases of medical malpractice reported to the state's Board of Medicine between 1993 and 2001. And a recent analysis of medical negligence records in Kentucky found that from 1992 to 2001, only 16 percent of the state's doctors were responsible for 100 percent of the medical malpractice there.
In the face of such compelling evidence that bad-apple doctors commit a large percentage of medical malpractice, one might assume that the profession and its insurers would weed out the repeat offenders. Not so.
We have the medical profession who is loath to weed out their own nest compounded by meritless law suits which is a different problem from having multitudinous frivolous malpractice claims compounded by a few bad medical practitioners. There are frivolous law suits, but not as many as critics claim and 85% of them result in no financial award. A Harvard study showed that 40% of initial filings were frivolous and 15% of awards were to these law suits. Yes, that's a problem, about $16.5 billion annually; but compare that to private health insurance company profits estimated to be around $250-$350 billion annually (depending upon your source) and the "problem" starts to come into focus. The profit margins on private health insurance policies is 15-21 times the problem of Frivolous Law Suits, but don't expect any anti-intellectual Republican to do the math and figure that out.
Republicans have no problem making our government bigger and intruding into our lives by adding expensive barriers and restrictions on people's ability to obtain just compensation for medical errors (note, I said just compensation), but they do have trouble regulating malpractice insurers. Why doesn't the Democratic Majority stop this? They are too busy reaching across the aisle.
Malpractice study links (won't embed properly)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/...
Conservative thought believes effective health care reform must find a way to limit, restrict or eliminate malpractice law suits.
That concept is a main stay of the RNC's health care reform play book and they have convinced us that it's accurate to think that 90% of malpractice claims are frivolous, but it's not 90%; it's 40% that garners 15% of the total dollars awarded in such suits, or $16.5 billion out of $2.2 Trillion in health care expenditures - a huge difference.
Debunking this mythic position as another bogey man waiting to attack you is an uphill battle. (Suing a hospital for throwing a dead baby away with the trash is NOT a frivolous law suit.)
Web sites gather the anecdotal evidence, but haven't done the peer reviewed studies that will prove their case. These same web sites ignore the research that is already there. Neither the RNC nor the DNC addresses the issue that malpractice insurers have price gouged doctors in the same way health insurers gouge health care consumers. That would go against RNC core principles and the DNC's principles of trying to make friends out of obstructionists. This study of malpractice insurers is sure to be ignored by lawmakers (heh, but not by me, emphasis added):
medical insurance premiums charged by insurance companies do not correspond to increases or decreases in payouts, which have been steady for 30 years. Rather, premiums rise and fall in concert with the state of the economy — insurance premiums (in constant dollars) increase or decrease in direct relationship to the strength or weakness of the economy, reflecting the gains or losses experienced by the insurance industry’s market investments and their perception of how much they can earn on the investment "float" (which occurs during the time between when premiums are paid into the insurer and losses paid out by the insurer) that doctors’ premiums provide them.
Despite the claims about ridiculous malpractice suits and awards, total costs from this source represent only 5% of the increases in health care cost in the U.S. and have remained so for many years. Of that 5%, one half of the amount is devoted to risk management consultation and training to reduce liability. There should be a calculated and estimated savings accrued by this focus that is then subtracted from actual malpractice settlement contribution to total health care costs.
So, the study quoted above says that only 2.5% of the annual increases in health care spending are attributable to increases in malpractice awards and another 2.5% of the increase is due to the costs of risk management programs that are meant to reduce malpractice claims. That's 5% of of the typical 6.1% increase. Ok, these numbers are starting to get really small. "Runaway" Malpractice awards are responsible for annual rise of 1/3rd of 1% in health care expenditures.
Compare malpractice to health insurance premiums that have doubled between 2000 and 2008, an average annual increase of 12.5%. The annual rise in insurance rates accounts for 3.9% of the 6.1% annual rise in total health care expenditures. Again, the problem comes into better focus. Insurance pays for 64% of our health care expenditures and the insurance companies charge an extra $250-$250 billion profit margin on top of those expenses. Again, for-profit health insurers are more than 10 times the problem of "runaway" costs due to "frivolous" medical malpractice awards.
What's insane is the point of view that we require congressional regulation to limit malpractice awards that total $16.5 billion per year, but nothing needs to be done to regulate the insurance companies' profits of $250-$350 billion per year.
Congress needs a reality check. The reality is that the funds spent on correcting medical errors could be better apportioned. We spend a great deal of money in court rooms and not enough on the care for people hurt by medical "misadventure". The problem with tort reform, beltway style, is that the victims/survivors will find they're getting the short end of the stick - again.