The Bush White House might be able to make a reasonable case for “tort reform,” if only evidence and facts didn’t keep getting in their way.
In his pitch for legislation imposing a “hard cap of $250,000” on medical malpractice awards for non-economic damages, President Bush points the finger at what he calls “a broken medical liability system.” But a new analysis of malpractice claims filed over 15 years in his home state of Texas found no such crisis there.
“We find no evidence of the medical malpractice crisis that produced headlines over the last several years and led to legal reform in Texas and other states,” a group of four legal scholars concluded in a report being released today.
“What we found is a sea of calm” in Texas malpractice claim cases from 1988 to 2002, said co-author David A. Hyman, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Illinois. “So, at least in Texas, the tort system can’t be the cause of spikes in malpractice premiums.”
Texas was identified by the American Medical Association as one of more than a dozen states suffering from a malpractice “crisis.”
The Bush gang really isn’t good at identifying crises, now are they?
Texas is the second most populous state and the third largest in terms of total health care spending. It also, fortunately, is one of the few states with a publicly available, comprehensive database of legal claims filed against physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers.
All available evidence explains that the idea of a malpractice “crisis” is utterly ridiculous.
Over the last 15 years:
* Large claims (with payouts of at least $25,000 in 1988 dollars) were roughly constant in frequency.
* The percentage of claims with payments of more than $1 million remained steady at about 6 percent of all large claims.
* The number of total paid claims per 100 practicing physicians per year fell to fewer than five in 2002 from greater than six in 1990-92.
* Mean and median payouts per large paid claim were roughly constant.
* Jury verdicts in favor of plaintiffs showed no trend over time.
* The total cost of large malpractice claims was both stable and a small fraction (less than 1 percent) of total health care expenditures in Texas.
Bush recently told a carefully-screened, sycophantic audience, “Many of the costs that we’re talking about don’t start in an examining room or an operating room. They start in a courtroom. What’s happening all across this country is that lawyers are filing baseless suits against hospitals and doctors. That’s just a plain fact.”
In Bush’s world, “facts” are funny things.