Fred Holmes escribió:
And I'm sure you're not one of those uneducated who will bring up the lack of
tort reform as a reason for high insurance costs.
So how much does liability insurance / damage claims add to the cost of
healthcare? As a percentage of overall costs?
The main problem with high insurance costs for consumers is that medical
practitioners are not policing themselves, and states don't police them
either until too many patients are harmed. In too many cases,
incompetent doctors who maim or kill patients, and bad hospitals, are
still in business when they should be shut down and have medical
licenses taken away. That could reduce insurance costs for everybody.
However, when Republicans talk about tort reform, they want to limit the
ability of patients who have been injured due to medical incompetence to
have their cases ineligible for hearings or trials. This injures more
patients without solving the problem, while also hurting the lawyers who
file legitimate cases, in effect, further denying coverage in multiple
ways. "Tort reform" in the US is a euphemism for keeping Democratic
lawyers from helping injured patients, solely because they're not
Republican.
The liability and damage claims as a percentage of overall costs is less
than 5%. The biggest health insurance cost to consumers from private
for-profit companies is "overhead"--which is about 2-3% for Medicare,
around 10% for private non-profits, and 20-30% for the for-profit
companies. The for-profit companies made bad investments and raised
premiums to make up for that, too. So "tort reform" makes minimal
difference when compared to having nonprofit health insurance. After
all, it's immoral to profit from others' illnesses and misfortunes, so
why do many health health insurance executives have multi-million dollar
salaries and benefits, and insurance companies have billion dollar profits?
That's what causes high premiums, not a trumped up "need" for tort reform.
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