If you want to fix the health care system, the solution is not tort reform. The solution is fixing waste and fraud inherent in the system. From Reader’s Digest:
Last year, a Senate report revealed that in the previous seven years, the federal Medicare program had paid as much as $92.8 million for about a half-million claims submitted in the names of doctors who were six feet under. The charges were for medical supplies, ranging from wheelchairs to prescription drugs. One pair of scam artists in Florida used the Medicare identification numbers of dead docs to bilk $1.3 million from the government—also known as we the taxpayers.It’s not like this was a hard crime to spot. More than 50,000 of the bogus claims involved doctors who had been deceased for at least ten years. Despite a warning from the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) in 2001 about exactly this problem, tough safeguards were never put in place.
Here’s another good one: the podiatrist who allegedly billed the government for treating people with no feet. Dr. David Quang Pham was indicted in St. Louis this past June for charging the government for nonexistent procedures that he backed up with phony notes (Pham has pleaded not guilty). As an unforgettable press release from the local U.S. Attorney’s office put it, “Dr. Pham submitted reimbursement claims for treating the feet of patients whose feet had been amputated prior to the dates of service.” And once again, it was the taxpayer who had to, er, foot the bill.
People will want to say these are minor exceptions, but they aren’t.
[T]here’s no disputing one important truth: Shocking amounts of money are stolen by crooked doctors and scammers, and that’s driving up costs for all of us. The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association estimates that more than $60 billion a year is lost to fraud—or 3 percent of federal health-care spending. Think of how all that money could improve, extend, or outright save lives.
Fraud alone accounts for 3% of health care costs.
Meanwhile, litigation accounts for less than 1.5% of health care costs. Furthermore, while fraud is an absolute rip-off that is passed on to the rest of us, litigation costs – i.e. damage awards in lawsuits – are determined by a panel of jurors, every day people like you or I who have sat and listened to the facts of the case, heard expert testimony from doctors on both sides of the case, and awarded damages based on negligent acts of the defendant(s) and in order to compensate the plaintiff(s) for catastrophic injuries or death.
Insurance companies are given virtual monopolies, as they cannot do business across state lines, which also drives up costs. Lawsuits against doctors have actually decreased since the 1980s. Only a small percentage of people ever file a claim against a doctor for negligent treatment.
Tort reform also violates the 7th Amendment of the US Constitution.
Finally, why single out doctors for special treatment? If I injure you in a car accident, you get what a jury awards you. If you suffer the same injuries because of the faulty construction of your home, your damages against the contractor(s) are what the jury awards you. If anyone injures you for any reason, your damages are set by the market…unless you are a doctor. Then the damages against you are capped. You have a $1 million dollar case, injuries-wise? That’s fine if the defendant is the driver or owner of an automobile. That’s fine if the defendant is a contractor, lawyer, Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. But if you have $1 million dollars worth of injuries and the defendant is a doctor? Sorry, the legislature has determined, without the benefit of knowing anything about your case, that your case is only worth $250,000 as against this defendant (how un-conservative). Makes sense. So it’s not even real tort reform, which would be across the board. Rather, it’s a hand-out to the malpractice insurance companies who cover doctors for their malpractice. That’s right, it is a hand-out to the insurance companies that are already gouging you with the high prices that are currently responsible for our health care crisis.
All the citations to the above claims can be found here, here, here and here, in my previous posts on the subject.
Cross-posted at PFB Blog.
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