IMPROVING HEALTHCARE RESULTS AND COSTS IS SIMPLE: ENACT TORT REFORM

TORT REFORM HAS BEEN PROVEN EFFECTIVE:

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A recent survey of doctors published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 93 percent of physicians admit to practicing defensive medicine.

A 2008 survey by the Massachusetts Medical Society found that about 25 percent of medical procedures are defensive in nature.

Defensive medicine wastes patients’ and doctors’ time and costs $191 billion annually, according to the best scholarly research.

Such waste drives up the cost of medical care and the price of health insurance.

In fact, by making health insurance more expensive, defensive medicine adds at least 3.4 million Americans to the rolls of the uninsured, and reduced productivity and annual output by more than $41 billion in 2008.

To ease the burdens of malpractice lawsuits, jury awards should be capped for impossible-to-quantify “pain and suffering,” so-called non-economic damages.

According to my study “Tort Law Tally,” capping awards in med-mal lawsuits cuts losses an average of 39 percent and annual insurance premiums by 13 percent.

But the most important benefit from caps is better access to care.

States with caps have 12 percent more physicians per capita than states without caps, according to a study published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Non-economic-damage caps were an integral part of the malpractice reforms adopted in Missouri in 2005. Skyrocketing malpractice premiums had caused shortages of specialists, and patients had problems getting treatment. Thanks to the reforms, med-mal claims in Missouri are at a 30-year low. Average payouts are $50,000 lower than they were in 2005, before the caps went into effect.

Texas capped non-economic damages in 2003 as part of a broader tort-reform package, and since then, more than 16,500 doctors have flooded into Texas, many to previously underserved rural and minority communities. Texas has jumped six spots in the American Medical Association’s ranking of doctors per capita. Nearly 430,000 Texans have health insurance today as a result of the medical liability reforms, says the Perryman Group.

• ALL WE NEED TO DO TO IMPROVE HEALTHCARE RESULTS AND COSTS IS TO ENACT TORT REFORM.

• TO DO TORT RFORM ALL WE GOTTA DO IS VOTE OUT THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND IN THE GOP.

IT'S THAT SIMPLE.

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