Imagine you are a member of Congress and you have been presented with a fairly small piece of legislation. You get a report from the CBO that the proposal will:
- reduce the federal deficit by $5.4 billion every year for ten years,
- increase tax revenues by $1.3 billion every year for ten years,
- create an environment that would put $11 billion back in the pockets of Americans through lower health care costs,
- not raise taxes on anyone by so much as a penny, and.
- is already being successfully used by many states, which are seeing real savings in health care costs.
Is that something you’d try to pass? Would you at least bring it up as a serious part of the debate over health care reform?
You should know, the decision won’t come without cost. If you put the proposal into place, you’ll earn at least the temporary enmity of one of your wealthiest and most faithful campaign contributors and political backers. They’ll be ticked off, at least for a little while, though you can be reasonably certain they won’t abandon you completely nor are they likely to mount any sort of lasting effort to get you voted out of office.
This is the choice today for 535 members of Congress. The proposal is tort reform and the CBO report is real. In fact, if the cost savings remain static for ten years, tort reform all by itself could save the country $164 billion over a decade.
Of course, the trial lawyer lobby is all over this like toppings on a Michael Moore breakfast sundae.
The American Association for Justice, a trial lawyers trade group, said the news from CBO shows that there is limited financial gain and much health risk at reforming medical malpractice laws.
The “findings reiterate what we’ve always known, that medical malpractice claims have almost no effect on overall health care spending,” association President Anthony Tarricone said Friday. “Along with the CBO’s numbers and countless other academic assessments, the vast majority of empirical evidence suggests that there are only minuscule savings to be found in reforming our nation’s civil justice system.”
It’s probably a good thing that Anthony Tarricone is a lawyer and not a mathematician because 164 billion dollars is not “minuscule” to me or anyone else not making a living off of multimillion-dollar settlements of which the clients usually only see a small portion.
Given the CBO’s confidence in its findings, I have the same question as Ruby Slippers: “Is it me or should tort reform be an automatic?” It seems like an easy decision to me. Then again, I don’t have tons of trial lawyer cash pouring into my campaign coffers.
The real question is, which members of Congress have the courage to take on the trial lawyers and stand up for lower deficits, more money in our pockets, and lower health care costs?
Tags: Courts and the Law, Health Care
The GOP has the guts to take on the lawyers, but we don’t have the votes. The only constituency that supports that current medical malpractice system is the one who is enriched by it. The current system injures physicians, wastes billions of $$$ and exposes patients to an avalanche of unnecessary medical tests. Why should we reform such a great system that works so well?
See http://www.MDWhistleblower.blogspot.com under Legal Quality category.
No democrat will even consider this idea, it creates too big of a hole in their reelection account. The democrats always go to the money, people don’t matter. The corruption that is caused by this one group will (I hope) be fatal to the DNC and the RNC as well. The RNC does not have the courage to do this either, even though they will not get the contributions they do not have the courage or leadership to attempt it.