The TOO STUPID TO BE ALIVE CROWD keeps asking about tort reform at the townhalls. I guess it's too much to ask them to Google it. Seeing as how they're not only MORONS they're LAZY too!
IN THE STATES THAT PASSED TORT REFORM THE COST OF PREMIUMS ROSE!
DUH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why don't you people do the world a favor and COMMIT SUIDCIDE!
Twelve years after California's enactment of tort reform, the average malpractice insurance premium had risen 190 percent. At that point Proposition 103, regulating medical malpractice and many other forms of insurance, was placed on the ballot and approved by voters in 1988. Insurance companies had to negotiate rate changes with John Garamendi, the new commissioner of insurance. After initial court challenges and adjustments, malpractice premiums dropped and malpractice insurers refunded more that $135 million to policy holders.
California's experience shows that tort reform did not hold down malpractice premium increases; insurance regulation did much more. None of this is news. A Congressional Budget Office report of 2004 found "no evidence that restrictions on tort liability reduce medical spending." In 2003, Texas lawmakers enacted a cap on malpractice awards like California's. There was a marked drop in malpractice suits filed. Within a few months, however, the nation's largest medical malpractice insurer, GE Medical Protective, raised its premiums in Texas.
Time Magazine (June 9, 2003) reported a Weiss Ratings study that found that in the preceding decade states with caps on non-economic damage awards saw doctor's malpractice premiums rise 48 percent while states without caps saw rises of only 36 percent. The median premium was about the same in both groups of states.
What do we know from all of this? First, we already have tort reform. Tort reform has reduced the number of malpractice suits. This has resulted in no reduction in health care costs in general, or in malpractice premiums in particular. California, with its Proposition 103, has shown that the whole array of insurance costs can be contained through regulation, just what Republican leaders do not want.
Congressman Herger accepts the evidence, presented by the Congressional Budget Office, that we face a health care crisis. He sees it strictly as a cost-containment problem. Even from this morally wanting perspective his solutions are non-solutions. Tort reform, largely in place anyhow, will result in no measurable health care savings. His other cost reduction solution, letting any insurance company in any state insure in any other state, would be disastrous to the insured because of lax rules in some states. Prior to 1975 California had a system in which, but for health and life insurance, insurance was totally market-based with no insurance commission involved. This free-market approach produced the sky-rocketing premiums that led to Proposition 103.
Slogans, chants, foot stomping and testimonials at a public meeting are invigorating to the true believers, but they obscure much and reveal little. The public needs facts to decide how best to avoid the health care train wreck that both sides agree is headed our way if we continue doing what we have done in the past. Congressman Herger's solution: Do it harder.
That just won't work.
http://www.redding.com/news/2009/aug/31/bob-williams-the-holy-grail-of-tort-reform/?partner=RSS
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