Forgive me if I seem skeptical of President Obama’s assertion last evening in his State of the Union address when he said that he was “willing to look at other ideas to bring down [health care] costs, including one that Republicans suggested last year: medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits.” The president has in the past made clear his opposition to such reform, saying that he did not “believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet.” This despite the fact that abusive tort litigation against medical providers greatly increases …
No one is more familiar with the health care system than doctors. So what do they have to say about Obamacare? Nothing good, according to a recent survey. The Physicians Foundation found that “rather than a sign of progress, the survey suggests that most physicians view health reform as a further erosion of the unfavorable conditions with which they must contend.” Furthermore, Obamacare “has further disengaged doctors from their profession, with potentially negative consequences for both the medical profession and for the quality and accessibility of medical care in the …
Former Office for Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag recently wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on the need for medical malpractice reform. Well, kind of. Orszag’s approach has more to do with creating stricter mechanisms to enforce physicians’ compliance with evidence-based guidelines than with reforming the tort system to better protect doctors and patients. Orszag writes, “What’s needed is a much more aggressive national effort to protect doctors who follow evidence-based guidelines. That’s the only way that malpractice reform could broadly promote the adoption of best …
It’s long been established that part of controlling rising health care spending in the United States will mean enacting meaningful medical malpractice, or “tort”, reform. Though tort reform is not a silver bullet to creating savings, it is one of many changes vital to containing patients’ medical costs. Unfortunately, in passing the mammoth Obamacare, Congress and the president failed to take tort reform seriously, leaving out any serious provisions to encourage states to reform their medical malpractice laws. Instead, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act threw an illusory bone …
When Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently addressed a crowd of health policy experts about the issues surrounding the nation’s physician shortage, she had the opportunity to highlight the fundamental problems doctors have been shouting about, like medical malpractice reform. Alas, she mostly stuck to the tired talking points that more primary-care physicians would flock to the profession if there were only more preventive services, more health information technology and better coordination of chronic diseases. That’s not to knock any of those measures, but they fail to address …
When President Obama held his health care summit at the White House, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) pointed out that a key part of containing medical costs was completely missing from the debate: medical malpractice legal reform. The cost of defensive medicine alone (without taking into account the direct costs of such claims) “could be as high as $239 billion” according to a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers cited by Camp. So what was President Obama’s response? He basically interrupted Camp and told him to “finish up.” On March 3, when Obama gave …
In what was billed as doctors trekking across the country to enthusiastically support President Barrack Obama’s health care agenda, his press conference at the White House on Monday was in need of serious resuscitation. From a lackluster response among the 150 doctors (outfitted in their “spiffy-looking” white coats lest we forgot who they were) at the event to Obama’s same go-to talking points to justify massive federal spending and Washington control of health care, it’s hard to understand how this conference added any value or differentiation from the dozens of …
