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Most people understand that the vast
majority of medical professionals are doing their best, it’s “the system” that
needs fixing. Most people have complaints about their health insurance coverage
even as the evidence mounts that we have a health care crises about to crash on
us like a tsunami. Blaming the tort system alone is a diversionary tactic, much
like radical surgery on Social Security when incremental treatments are
sufficient. Until we have national leadership that
will admit that the solution to everything is not more privatization, or that
the only course is to attack the target preemptively, without examining all
courses of action and building coalitions to ensure a comprehensive campaign,
we will continue to suffer politics of divide and conquer. And that won’t solve
the health care crises. KwC C/o Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly: Malpractice
Again and Again....Just
in case you haven't gotten the message yet, here's another study of medical
malpractice that comes to the same conclusion as practically every other study
done in the past couple of years: the medical malpractice
"crisis" is mostly an invention of insurance companies and their
friends in Congress. As the chart below shows, malpractice payouts have grown at
about the same rate as medical costs in general. In 1992, malpractice payouts
amounted to about 0.3% of total healthcare spending and 1.2% of physician and
clinical spending. In 2002, the numbers were....0.3% and 1.2%. (And yes, before
anyone asks, these figures are for both court judgments and out-of-court
settlements. The data comes from mandatory reporting of malpractice payments to
the National Practitioner Data Bank, which has been required by federal law
since 1990. It includes everything.) The basic numbers are
pretty simple: the
number of total judgments per physician has gone gradually down, while the
total value of payouts has gone gradually up. However, the increase has been
small, and matches the overall growth in medical costs.
You can argue about
whether malpractice costs should grow at the same rate as overall medical costs
or not, but it's a tiny argument, not an excuse for crisis mongering. In fact,
what's most striking about the numbers is that growth in payouts has been steady and slow. There
haven't been any spikes, and certainly no excuses for sudden 100% increases in
insurance premiums. Analysts on all sides
of this debate agree that reform of the malpractice process would be a good
idea. But for
the most part, the skyrocketing premiums we've seen over the past couple of
years are the result of insurance company incompetence and greed, not actual
increases in malpractice payouts. Until everyone figures this out, there's not much chance
of making any real progress. June 21, 2005 Malpractice
Update....The
Wall Street Journal has a
terrific article today about how one group of doctors has successfully
decreased their malpractice premiums over the past couple of decades. Their
secret? Less malpractice: Rather than pushing for laws that would protect them against
patient lawsuits...anesthesiologists focused on improving patient safety. Their
theory: Less harm to patients would mean fewer lawsuits. Ø
.All
this has helped save lives....Malpractice payments involving the nation's 30,000
anesthesiologists are down, too, and anesthesiologists typically pay some of
the smallest malpractice premiums around. That's a huge change from when they
were considered among the riskiest doctors to insure. Ø
Twenty
years ago, little was known about people injured or killed during anesthesia. No U.S. database existed, so
anesthesiologists set out to create one. They decided to collect information
from insurers on closed malpractice claims, those in which insurers had made a
payment or otherwise disposed of the complaint.
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