Reply #10: 6x2=12

[YNGW]

>Just got my first lecture on malpractice in med school and apparently the rising costs of malpractice insurance isn't from awards given to patients who suffered bad outcomes from their doctors, its from massive number of settlements made by the malpractice lawyers b/c its cheaper to settle a case than fight it out in a court of law.

To me, that's six of one and a half dozen of the other. Either way, the insurance is high because of all the money they pay out.

>I do not support the capping awards to patients who win malpractice lawsuits.

Should we ever move to universal healthcare, I would be in favor of a cap. The gov't would negotiate with the drug companies what they're willing to pay, the doctors would be told by the gov't what would be paid for medical procedures, and lawyers would not be permitted to represent patients for medical procedures gone wrong. Any cases would be left up to an arbitrator. If you didn't like the outcome, you could appeal one more time to a Senior arbitrator. But regardless, everyone is going to have to forfeit something in order to keep costs down.

If insurance companies are paying out large sums of cash for things that went wrong, that will cause them to increase malpractice insurance to cover the costs of those settlements, which means the gov't will have to increase what it pays for medical procedures to doctors so they, in turn, can pay the increased premiums, which means the gov't will have to collect more money from those of us who pay taxes. Ultimately, the taxpayer bears the cost of these large settlements. So, you cap the settlements. The insurance companies know that no matter what, the maximum they will have to pay out is $X, they can budget and keep down the cost of malpractice insurance, which keeps down the cost doctors have to pay for premiums, which lowers the cost required for them to be paid for procedures, which means less tax money required to run the healthcare system.

I say a good cap would be $1 million. You die on the operating table as a result of a doctor's error, your estate gets $1 million, that's it. No reason that we the taxpayer should have to annie up a bunch of cash to the gov't to cover the cost of some large payout because of some doctors mistake.