There is not a lot of malpractice — there are a lot of scum sucking bottom dwelling attorneys that take flimsy cases on a contingency basis. When it cost nearly $250,000 to try a malpractice case, when an insurance company gets a cost of defense settlement offer for say $100k, they consider themselves 150k ahead and control their costs
The attorney takes 33% -> essentially 33,000 for a few nasty letters and the plaintiff takes $67,000.
The fact of the matter is that this the largest contribution cost to modern medicine as there is so much defensive medicine that drives the costs of healthcare up.
There is nothing that is market forced in this medical system — the government has assured that. I happen to agree with you that a purely free market system should exist that includes torts should be paid for by plaintiff. If a plaintiff had to shell out a retainer of $50,000 for a complaint and summons you would see an immediate drop in malpractice litigation.
Obviously you have bought into the Morgan and Morgan definition of malpractice, not the actual legal definition.
I have heard the exact comment you made here from a good friend (well, my closest friend...met in kindergarten while our parents attended Republican party meetings in the Eisenhower era...) who is currently in a managerial role for a large hospital operating group.
His comment was that with the high cost of even one mistake, the actual costs would stay high since SOMEONE is going to make a mistake and probably one a day across the national system, leading to massive risk exposure on a daily basis.
Not that the general quality of docs was bad, just that with the sheer number of opportunities to have something go south, something would. And the resulting cost would be astronomical.
But I think the solution is two fold, and it’s based on my own rather unpleasant experience: have seen actual mistakes made by a foreign doc - he got wire brushed by the State Medical board after I referred him, and after a few other similar complaints, I think he’s relaxing in a condo near a beach somewhere, without the opportunity to drop the ball on another case - and in another instance (my father’s last days on planet Earth), a foreign doc who was not incompetent, but not particularly brilliant either, and got pushed by a Chief Resident to take the path of least resistance because it was expedient.
And thus the two points...
1 - Tort reform as you point out; much medical time/expense is now devoted to layers of CYA review/testing etc to produce a paper trail that can’t be assailed (but will be anyway in court)
2 - A larger group of MDs and concomitant residency slots who should be able to produce overall better results at a lower cost since Item 1 will free up available cash for them, not tests, lawyers, and awards.
An emotional and patriotic benefit would be that more homegrown docs would be involved due to Item 2; it’s ridiculous that the current game appears to be artificially limiting the number of docs in this country with the assumption that any shortfall can be cheaply made up by importing eager foreigners of questionable quality.
My viewpoint may be simplistic and certainly one from the consumer side, but I’ve seen examples of both situations and experienced their side effects.
I don’t know what the Morgan & Morgan definition of malpractice is. For purposes of our further discussion, you should post a link to a definition of malpractice we can agree on.
I do not think a pure market is possible. I think there should simply be more market force present, to the point that only half of the qualified applicants get turned away from med school. Trump had some interesting ideas on lowering prescription costs. There are a few simple things that can be done but the AMA is definitely in the way.
One thing the AMA shoulda been doing all along is hire kickass lawyers to defend doctors. But there’s no money in it for them, so they don’t do it.