Consumer Law

Obama?s Health Care Overhaul Spurs Docs? Broken Record Attacks on Patients? Rights

By Andy Hoffman

As Carol Ann remarked in Poltergeist II, ?They?re back!?  That?s right civil justice fans, with all the appeal of five-day-old Chinese food, organized medicine and their lobbyists have reportedly been screaming about limiting injured patients? access to the civil justice system again?this time as a condition of supporting any Obama-backed health care legislation.

Predictably, the same old talking points are back, with special emphasis on the perennial favorites, ?costs? and ?defensive medicine.?

Never mind that everyone from the Congressional Budget Office to insurance experts (and also here) have consistently shown that malpractice premiums and claims are each a tiny percentage (1-2 percent) of overall health care costs.  Actually, total medical malpractice payouts, for all injuries and deaths caused by medical negligence in the nation (hovering between $5 billion and $6 billion annually) is less than half of what Americans pay for dog and cat food each year.  Yet the cost of preventable medical errors, which kill up to 98,000 people in hospitals each year, is a whopping $17 billion to $29 billion each year.

You?ll also pardon us for rolling our eyes at long-since-refuted rants about so-called ?defensive medicine.?  The fact is every government agency that has taken a serious look at the issue of "defensive medicine" (see lots of citations here) has found little or no evidence of it, especially in this era of managed care.  (?? managed care provides a financial incentive not to offer treatments that are unlikely to have medical benefit.?)

Doctors, President Obama, Congress, and anyone else willing to listen?if we really want to bring down health care costs, let?s stop talking about trying to solve health care problems on the backs of patients, and let's start talking about how we stop medical malpractice!

Full post as published by ThePopTort on March 17, 2009 (boomark / email).