Rusted Sky

The one thing he's said he _won't_ do is put a cap on medical malpractice suit awards.

Brother.

Have you heard _anyone_ even _ask_ what is driving the costs of health care higher? Who's getting all the money?

At a rough guess re what's driving health care costs - the lawyers?

In a litigious society, you'll have doctors refer out to specialists things that they would normally have treated - on the off chance that something will go wrong, he'd rather refer the patient out than explain WHY he didn't do it to a jury.

Follow the money. In 10 years, being a lawyer is going to be VERY profitable, if you can manage a 'win at any cost' mentality...

J.

A lot of the cost of new drugs is the predicted cost of defending against the lawsuits will inevitably be filed against the pharmaceutical companies that developed those drugs.

It isn't the cost of paying legitimate claims that increases the cost of new drugs and vaccines by a order of magnitude or more; it's the cost of defending against the frivolous and nonsensical suits that really drives up costs.

It doesn't matter that thousands of lives may be saved by a new drug. It doesn't even matter that nobody may be harmed by the new drug. If someone, somewhere, sometime decides that the new drug might, no matter how implausibly, have caused the least bit of damage to him or her some lawyer will see to it that that 'poor unfortunate' gets compensated for their pain by the cruel, uncaring, , negligent and rich big corporation.

Capping the amounts awarded to people legitimately harmed by negligent actions would actually be detrimental to the advancement of medical science. The few cases of major payouts to people legitimately harmed by unscrupulous or negligent medical practitioners serve the same purpose in the medical field that predators do in the wild. A few wolves in the woods actually help keep the deer herds healthy by eliminating the sick and weak and keeping the others from over breeding their food supply.

The lawyers that file hundreds of fee contingent suits for unharmed clients based on unscientific and medically unsound reasons in the hopes that the defendants will settle out of court instead of paying the legal costs of defending themselves occupy the equivalent ecological niche of tapeworms and leeches. Increasing the number of parasites infesting the deer never helps the overall health of the herd.

We need to eliminate the fee contingent law suit. Even requiring a token payment of $50 to $100 that must be paid by the plaintiff to cover the cost of filing the paper work to initiate a suit would drastically cut down on the number of frivolous law suits.

otpu

I would like to see:

1. The loser pays ALL the court costs. They have this in Europe; they don't have NEARLY as many lawyers as we do.

2. Doctors may not be sued for acting according to what was standard accepted medical practice at the time of the action. Years ago, when a baby was born severely premature, there was a choice between giving the preemie oxygen, so the brain would develop normally, but the retinas would suffer damage and the person would be blind but of normal intelligence, or not giving oxygen, so the preemie would grow up sighted but mentally retarded. The standard medical practice was to give them oxygen. Later, when medical science found a way to allow both normal brain development and sight, some of those who were blind because of the treatment they had gotten as preemies SUCCESSFULLY sued their doctors for doing what was the accepted medical practice at the time.

3. A free market in medical care. Consider that, 20 years ago, laser vision correction was an experimental procedure in the U.S.; it was available in only a few places, and cost over $20K. Now, lasik clinics advertise on the radio, you can shop around for a good deal from someone whom you can research and find the success rate for, and the cost is in the range of $5K, which is a lot less than $5K was worth 20 years ago. Contrast that with nonelective medical care. In 3rd-party paying setups, you can't shop around for a good deal or a good track record (in many places, they FORBID release of doctors' medical track records, even though the majority of medical misadventures are due to a small minority of doctors), the payer pays what THEY think a particular medical treatment should cost (and just TRY to find a medical vendor who will perform that service for that price), and there is no incentive on the part of the vendor to cut costs, because they get paid anyhow.