Posted on 08/21/2009 9:40:06 AM PDT by Starman417
Sarah Palin is calling for Tort Reform to be the hallmark of any kind of health care reform:
President Obama's health care "reform" plan has met with significant criticism across the country. Many Americans want change and reform in our current health care system. We recognize that while we have the greatest medical care in the world, there are major problems that we must face, especially in terms of reining in costs and allowing care to be affordable for all. However, as we have seen, current plans being pushed by the Democratic leadership represent change that may not be what we had in mind -- change which poses serious ethical concerns over the government having control over our families’ health care decisions. In addition, the current plans greatly increase costs of health care, while doing lip service toward controlling costs.We need to address a REAL bipartisan reform proposition that will have REAL impacts on costs and quality of patient care.
As Governor of Alaska, I learned a little bit about being a target for frivolous suits and complaints (Please, do I really need to footnote that?). I went my whole life without needing a lawyer on speed-dial, but all that changes when you become a target for opportunists and people with no scruples. Our nation’s health care providers have been the targets of similar opportunists for years, and they too have found themselves subjected to false, frivolous, and baseless claims. To quote a former president, “I feel your pain.”
So what can we do? First, we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined. For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he'll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.
Dr. Stuart Weinstein, with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, recently explained the problem:
”The medical liability crisis has had many unintended consequences, most notably a decrease in access to care in a growing number of states and an increase in healthcare costs.
Access is affected as physicians move their practices to states with lower liability rates and change their practice patterns to reduce or eliminate high-risk services. When one considers that half of all neurosurgeons—as well as one third of all orthopedic surgeons, one third of all emergency physicians, and one third of all trauma surgeons—are sued each year, is it any wonder that 70 percent of emergency departments are at risk because they lack available on-call specialist coverage?”
Dr. Weinstein makes good points, points completely ignored by President Obama. Dr. Weinstein details the costs that our out-of-control tort system are causing the health care industry and notes research that “found that liability reforms could reduce defensive medicine practices, leading to a 5 percent to 9 percent reduction in medical expenditures without any effect on mortality or medical complications.” Dr. Weinstein writes:
“If the Kessler and McClellan estimates were applied to total U.S. healthcare spending in 2005, the defensive medicine costs would total between $100 billion and $178 billion per year. Add to this the cost of defending malpractice cases, paying compensation, and covering additional administrative costs (a total of $29.4 billion). Thus, the average American family pays an additional $1,700 to $2,000 per year in healthcare costs simply to cover the costs of defensive medicine.
Excessive litigation and waste in the nation’s current tort system imposes an estimated yearly tort tax of $9,827 for a family of four and increases healthcare spending in the United States by $124 billion. How does this translate to individuals? The average obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) delivers 100 babies per year. If that OB-GYN must pay a medical liability premium of $200,000 each year (which is the rate in Florida), $2,000 of the delivery cost for each baby goes to pay the cost of the medical liability premium.”
You would think that any effort to reform our health care system would include tort reform, especially if the stated purpose for Obama’s plan to nationalize our health care industry is the current high costs.
So I have new questions for the president: Why no legal reform? Why continue to encourage defensive medicine that wastes billions of dollars and does nothing for the patients? Do you want health care reform to benefit trial attorneys or patients?
She goes on to write that in Texas, after enacting caps on lawsuit awards against providers, malpractice claims dropped 41%.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net ...
And to all those pundits on the right who said after she left the governor's office that she was toast: nyah nyah, you were sooooooo wrong.
“No wonder he keeps on wee weeing himself, poor guy”
ROFL. Palin is such a mean bully. :-)
hmmmmm...not a bad name for a political party
Our Sarah does it again!
My respect for her grows each day.
What a breath of fresh air she is!
Guarantee is a strong statement. I can't even guarantee that a large volcanic eruption won't start in the next few hours and prevent the sun from rising in the morning. But logically, I would take the odds of my life savings in a bet that the sun will rise.
Logically, it lowers costs by a good amount and will drive down costs. To what extent can be debated but there is already data suggesting it is a good amount.
Here is something else to consider along the lines of tort reform. Class Action Lawsuits should be made illegal for most issues. Class action lawsuits serve little to no purpose except to make lawyers rich, make evil corporations pay and to add extra warnings labels telling us not to eat Bengay.
I was recently involved in a class action lawsuit (solicitation in the mail where I could only opt out). Turns out we won the multimillion dollar lawsuit against a credit card company. I actually received a check FOR $0.88. That's right, I was awarded under a dollar when the real about was suppose to be something like $3.50 for the wrong the credit card company did to me (?). It was a card a had a long time ago and apparently I was charged an illegal fee. Guess who collected big time.
The same crap happens with the major drug companies and medical vendors. Class action lawsuits need regulation too (tort reform).
I’ve become addicted to checking her Facebook page. BTW, her Facebook numbers are 812,622, an increase of 12,000 in the past 2 days. Once this new op/ed gets circulation that number will increase substantially. Look for her to hit 1 million by mid-September. If she does appear at the 9-12 event, look for her numbers to skyrocket past the 1 million mark. I know a lot of people have been critical of her using Facebook, but it is a great platform to use to bypass the MSM altogether, and she has a rather large audiance on Facebook, and from there it spreads here, and to a multitude of pro-Palin blogs. This has already been picked up by the MSM, and by tomorrow it will probably dominate the news cycle for the entire weekend, exposing millions more people to her common sense approach to healthcare. Add energy independence, and her following will really start growing, beyond the control of either the RNC or DNC.
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