Let's Save 98,000 Lives by Giving Doctors Less Incentive to Be Careful

In the last week that the House of Representatives was in session, the Republican leadership brought to the floor (and passed, obviously), a variety of bills they claim will improve healthcare in America.

One of these bills will create Association Health Plans which will allow insurers to offer plans that are exempt from a variety of state regulations (including fraud protections and mandates to cover such extravagant costs as diabetes management supplies and pregnancy & well-baby care). Nice. Way to protect the public.

However, perhaps even more egregious was the so-called HEALTH Act. More commonly known as "med mal reform," this bill is touted as the answer to cheaper, more accessible health care (for all we know, it may lead to the cure for the common cold as well). What the bill really would do is limit the amount an injured party can recover for non-economic damages to $250,000, no matter what the injury suffered or how appalling the mistake.

Just who are this bill's supporters? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce for one. You know, that bastion of consumer protection that would never advocate for any policy just to protect bad corporate actors.

The American Medical Association supports this bill as well (anyone shocked to hear that?). Docs argue that it will improve and lower the cost of care because doctors won't have to waste time and money practicing so much defensive medicine.

Let's consider that argument: doctors, who kill 98,000 Americans a year due to their carelessness (not to mention untold numbers of those they permanently main) will IMPROVE the quality of care they provide once there is little economic incentive to be careful? If they kill 98,000 men, women,and children a year when they are being "defensive," how many will they kill when they don't have to be so careful?

Is this really the way to bring down medical malpractice insurance premiums (the exhorbitant rates of which are the reason doctors give for their support of this bill)? Whatever happened to good old industry regulation? Interesting that the docs are not advocating actually making fewer mistakes or policing bad doctors more effectively (two things you'd think might also help patients and lower med mal premiums).

$250,000 isn't even a rounding error to insurance companies. Once this is the maximum payment for non-economic damages (which include the pain and suffering that a patient suffers for being blinded, paralyzed, or de-limbed by a negligent doctor), the trial becomes solely about economic losses. How are those calculated? By lost future wages.

So medical malpractice trials will become exercises in racial profiling. I can see it now: insurance company lawyers will argue that a young Latina victim would have grown up to become a minimum wage housekeeper, nanny, or Wal-Mart clerk and that the injured black youth would have dropped out of high school and faced minimal income prospects.

Lawsuits are one of the few remaining avenues in Republican America to force corporations and other powerful actors to change their ways and to internalize the economic costs of the impacts of their behavior on others. No toxic waste site in this country has ever been cleaned up out of a sense of social responsibility.

This bill is just one of many USCOC bills designed to take away the citizens' right of redress, and sadly, hundreds of working class Americans, including those who are daily exposed to toxic chemicals and other unsafe conditions at their jobsites and in their neighborhoods, are writing to their elected representatives pleading with them to pass so-called "tort reform."

We Dems have got to do a better job of explaining the benefits of our justice system. Instead of being afraid of defending the much-maligned trial lawyer, we must explain the value of lawsuits to protecting society's most vulnerable members.

We can start by reminding folks about Erin Brokovich, the Buffalo Creek Disaster, and the Tuskegee Experiment.

More info can be found here. And here.