This morning, I came across a blog advertisement from the American Medical Association — you can see it over to your left. It appears to be a survey with boxes a reader can click to offer a vote in answer to the question, “Are frivolous lawsuits raising your healthcare costs?”
The ad is practically deceptive in this regard: clicking on the boxes does not register your vote at all, but instead takes you to a web page on which the American Medical Association aims to whip up some hysteria about a crisis in healthcare costs it claims emerge from malpractice lawsuits. Is it really wise for the nation’s largest organization representing doctors to engage in baldly deceptive practices?
Not only is the American Medical Association willing to take advantage of our human credulity; they’re also willing to exploit viewers’ inattention to methodological rigor. So what if 71% of people in some unnamed survey, conducted somewhere, at some time or other, say “Yes” in response to the question, “Are frivolous lawsuits raising your healthcare costs?” So what? 71% of Americans may agree that frivolous Martians are stealing George W. Bush’s knickers, but that doesn’t make it actually true. While 71% of Americans may feel that frivolous lawsuits raise health care costs, that doesn’t make it actually true. Such results only tell us that the American Medical Association, which has a direct financial interest in not having to bother with patient malpractice lawsuits any more, has done a good job of using its authoritative position to convince people that it’s true.
And the thing is, it is not actually true that frivolous lawsuits are raising your health care costs to any appreciable extent. To begin with, as a 2004 Congressional Budget Office study concluded, costs associated with malpractice lawsuits account for less than 2 percent of health care spending. Of that 2% of health care spending, a large portion has to do with legitimate complaints regarding malpractice. Only a small portion of malpractice lawsuits are frivolous in nature, and only a small portion of those frivolous claims ever end up in court. The CBO study “found no evidence that restrictions on tort liability reduce medical spending.”
But still, the AMA wants you to think that their falsehood is true. It wants you to fall for the old ruse that what millions of Americans think is true must be true. And so it repeats the not only useless but downright intellectually irresponsible message that 71% of people in some study, somewhere, at some time, agreed that “frivolous lawsuits are raising your healthcare costs.” It not only places this irrelevant, misleading mythoid in advertisements, it repeates the faux statistic to our credulous politicians in official Congressional testimony.
What does this mean for the AMA? The way I see it, there are two possibilities. On the one hand, it is possible that the doctors running the American Medical Association are so profoundly ignorant of scientific research methodology that they don’t understand the problem associated with their irrelevant “71%” statistic. On the other hand, it is possible that the American Medical Association leadership is fully aware of the bogus nature of their statistic — and shamelessly uses the statistic, despite the fact that they know it is bereft of substantive significance, believing that the American public is so stupid that they can get away with the practice. Neither possibility reflects well on the character of the nation’s largest organization of doctors.
The American Medical Association just may sic its lawyers on me for saying what I’ve just said, in order to shut me up I suppose. Now that would be a frivolous lawsuit.
I hope Bush can work to improve health care as we are in a major health care crisis and millions lack coverage.