I\u2019ve heard this complaint from doctors before, often echoed by Republican politicians: Growing medical malpractice jury awards are causing malpractice insurance rates to skyrocket, resulting in higher medical costs for everyone. I remember a recent speech by President Bush where he said the most important thing we can do to control medical costs is tort reform.<\/p>\n
Really? I\u2019ve always wondered how much truth there was to this malpractice hype, so I did what I usually do \u2013 take the macroeconomic view. A bit of research (thank you, Google) was all that was required to find out that in 2003 (the last year I found any data) malpractice premiums in the US totaled about $10B. That same year, the US spent about $1.7 trillion on health care. That makes malpractice insurance costs much less than 1% of health costs. Even if there was some sort of multiplicative effect (doctors practicing \u201cdefensive medicine\u201d, etc.) there is little chance of total malpractice costs making up more than about 1% of health care costs. And since health care costs are growing at about 6 \u2013 7% per year, there is just no way that controlling malpractice costs could have any noticeable impact on the rising costs of medical care in the US.<\/p>\n
While doing this bit of internet research, I found that Tom Baker wrote a book in 2005 called The Medical Malpractice Myth where he makes this same basic argument. I think it is very important to look at how Americans can better control health spending. But harping on malpractice insurance just keeps us from focusing on a solution that might actually help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve heard this complaint from doctors before, often echoed by Republican politicians: Growing medical malpractice jury awards are causing malpractice insurance rates to skyrocket, resulting in higher medical costs for everyone. I remember a recent speech by President Bush where he said the most important thing we can do to control medical costs is tort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}