In his press conference last night, George W. Bush again proposed that doctors be made immune from lawsuit by patients who are hurt by them as a result of poor practice:
As far as health care goes, there are some practical ways to deal with health care costs. And one of the most practical ways is to get rid of these junk lawsuits that are running good doctors out of practice and running up the practice — the price of medicine, to pass it out of the House.
But 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 study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office 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.” It is undeniable that the price of malpractice insurance is going up. But is that due to a proportional rise in malpractice lawsuit payouts? No. A study released last year found that over the previous five years, medical malpractice rates paid by doctors had been hiked by 120 percent by insurance companies. The rise in medical malpractice payouts by the insurance companies in the same period: just 5.7 percent.
If George W. Bush is going to remove Americans’ liberty to seek redress in the courts (one of those things provided for in that pesky Constitution thingy), he ought to at least have the facts on his side. Which he doesn’t.
