Obama suggests tort reform as a compromise in health care battle
President Obama’s highly anticipated speech on health care ended with some comments on tort reform, a highly debated topic in the legal and medical professions.
The president indicated that malpractice reform may be a way to cut rising health care costs and that doctors could focus on medicine if the spectre of a medical malpractice lawsuit wasn’t looming over them. President Obama did not offer any specifics on how he thought this reform should look, but said he is open to the idea and will suggest different reforms be tested in individual states.
Let’s hope that health care reform doesn’t come at the cost of patient’s rights. Medical malpractice lawsuits are designed to help innocent patients recover from disastrous medical errors and punish the most negligent hospitals and doctors. Tort reform supporters often suggest caps on damages despite the fact that some patients who are legitimately in need of care after a doctor’s mistake will not receive the money they need for recovery. Damage caps would also remove the punitive sting from these lawsuits and the deterrence factor for negligent hospitals would be lost.
These types of suits have been smeared by supporters of tort reform as being frivolous and a major reason health care costs are so high. Both of these statements are untrue or exaggerated. There are already laws on the books to limit frivolous lawsuits and only the more egregious medical errors result in malpractice suits. On the issue of costs, malpractice lawsuits and the insurance that doctors carry to protect themselves from it only amounts to about 1% of health care costs.
Opponents of tort reform and personal injury lawyers will point to another statistic: the number of deaths each year as a result of a preventable medical error. While the definition of a preventable medical error is debated and somewhat ambiguous in these studies, conservative estimates have the number of malpractice deaths at 98,000 annually. Some studies, though, have that number closer to 150,000.
The vast majority of doctors do great work for their patients, but this does not change the fact that there is the occasional case of gross negligence. Patients in these cases have the right to recover damages that will take care of their resulting medical bills.
