Here’s a prediction for 2011 — Republicans in Congress will spend most of this year attempting to repeal or dismantle health care reform.
Access to affordable health care is a huge worry to Americans, including Americans with the deadly lung cancer mesothelioma. The cost of mesothelioma treatment could be ruinous to the uninsured.
Last year’s health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, should help millions of Americans afford better health care once all the provisions go into effect. But many politicians are determined to dismantle the law before it all goes into effect.
Another prediction is that we’ll continue to hear claims that “tort reform” is the magic bullet that will solve all our health care problems. This is true even though study after study has found that the actual cost of malpractice litigation comes to less than 2 percent of the nation’s health care cost.
We’re told over and over again that the bigger cost of malpractice is “defensive medicine.” Doctors order unnecessary tests and procedures because they fear being sued. And there are studies that appear to back up this claim. A number of surveys have been published in which doctors report that 18 to 28 percent of the tests and procedures they order are purely “defensive.” “Tort reform” advocates use these figures to estimate that “defensive medicine” is costing the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars.
However, a new study out of the University of Iowa has found that, in state after state, “reforming” malpractice law has no impact on physician “defensive” practices.
“We found that both generalist and specialist physicians fear being sued for malpractice even in states where their risk of being sued is relatively low,” said senior study author David Katz, M.D. “One likely explanation is that physicians’ concerns about malpractice are driven more by their perception that the malpractice tort process is unfair and arbitrary and less by their actual risk of getting sued.”
“The high levels of malpractice concern, even among physicians in relatively low-risk environments, is striking,” Katz said. “One possible explanation is that most physicians do not have the information to accurately access their actual risk of being sued.”
We’ve seen in state after state in which malpractice law is “reformed” that it has no impact on the cost of health care. Although physicians in “reformed” states usually do enjoy lower malpractice insurance premiums, these savings are not passed on to the consumer — the patient — and overall costs of health care continue to skyrocket.
And often, when the old “tort reform” law doesn’t work, state legislatures brilliantly respond by reforming tort even more.
Texas has “reformed” its tort laws so much that emergency room physicians have a near zero chance of being sued. Emily Ramshaw reported in the New York Times that the state’s 2003 tort reform law “made it more difficult for patients to win damages in any health care setting, but especially emergency rooms.”
In order to win a malpractice suit in Texas, patients have to prove an ER doctor acted with “willful and wanton” negligence, meaning a doctor wasn’t just careless but deliberately hurt the patient. Texas attorneys say this is an impossible threshold to meet and have stopped taking cases involving emergency room personnel.
Texas politicians like to brag that Texas malpractice premiums have gone down by 30 percent — which, they say, proves tort reform “works.” However, in the past ten years, patient health insurance premiums in Texas have gone up by almost 92 percent. It works? Heck of a job.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 3rd, 2011 at 9:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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