{"id":3711,"date":"2005-03-10T12:54:37","date_gmt":"2005-03-10T17:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/3711.html"},"modified":"2005-03-10T12:54:37","modified_gmt":"2005-03-10T17:54:37","slug":"reality-based-research-gets-in-the-way-of-tort-reform-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/reality-based-research-gets-in-the-way-of-tort-reform-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Reality-based research gets in the way of ‘tort reform’ — again"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

Texas was identified by the American Medical Association as one of more than a dozen states suffering from a malpractice “crisis.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Bush gang really isn’t good at identifying crises, now are they?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

All available evidence explains that the idea of a malpractice “crisis” is utterly ridiculous<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\nOver the last 15 years:<\/p>\n

* Large claims (with payouts of at least $25,000 in 1988 dollars) were roughly constant in frequency.<\/p>\n

* The percentage of claims with payments of more than $1 million remained steady at about 6 percent of all large claims.<\/p>\n

* 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. <\/p>\n

* Mean and median payouts per large paid claim were roughly constant. <\/p>\n

* Jury verdicts in favor of plaintiffs showed no trend over time. <\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bush recently told<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

In Bush’s world, “facts” are funny things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}