President Obama strolled into the lion’s den today, giving a speech on health care reform to the American Medical Association, historically one of the most vocal and effective organizations opposing past reform efforts.
Despite the AMA’s stated opposition to Obama’s “public option” proposal, the President’s carefully worded speech drew frequent rounds of applause from the Republican-leaning audience. Indeed the only smattering of boos Obama reportedly received came when he restated his long-held opposition to caps on medical malpractice awards. Which raises an idea…
If the government is going to offer a public option for health insurance, perhaps one way to soften doctors’ opposition would be to also offer a public option for medical malpractice insurance to those doctors who choose to participate in the plan and accept the negotiated fees for services? Seems to me that such a system where the same entity is insuring both doctors and patients might balance the incentive to keep costs low with the incentive to avoid outcomes that could result in expensive lawsuits.
Just thinkin’ out loud…
Goldy–
There is absolutely no end to government involvement in our lives in your book, is there.
Your Trial Attorney Ambulance Chaser buddies squeal like stuck hogs everytime caps have been mentioned. It is a MAJOR cost whether the government is the insurer or private insurers.
The CAP is looooooooooong overdue.
OINK. OINK.
A lawyer for insurance giant AIG told a Manhattan jury today that ex-CEO Hank Greenberg stole $4.3 billion from the company’s pension fund because he was angry about being forced out, according to the Associated Press. Personally, I think he should work it off on a chain gang at 10 cents an hour.
(1) The driving force between high medical-malpractice awards is the cost of long-term care where negligence causes permanant, but not fatal, injury. If that were handled outside the medical malpractice system, then large verdicts/settlements would be rare.
(2) High long-term medical costs are being driven upward in part by (a) the cost of subsidizing current uninsured patients, and (b)the high cost of medical malpractice insurance.
It seems to me we are in caught in a cycle – high medical costs result in higher malpractice premiums which result in higher medical costs.
The way to break the circle is to have a government no-fault medical plan which pays for long-term care, without a right of subrogation against the doctor and his insurance company. In a medical malpractice case, the calculation of damages could not include amounts for care provided by the government.
The winners of such a plan would be the patients and the doctors.
The losers would be (a) the insurance companies which currently make a large profit off of medical malpractice insurance, (b) medical malpractice Plaintiff’s attorneys who rely upon a high medical cost to boost the total award (and thereby their contingent fees), and (c) medical malpractice defense attorneys, who would have a lot less work to do.
How about CAPPING attorneys fees….and providing huge penalties to lawyers who file nuisance or even unsuccessful malpractice suits?
Look this is gonna fail America,,,,just like O-blah-blah’s Porkulous Package.
Did you read old Joe the Kook Bidens latest attempt to rationalize Porkulous despite unemployment rising Waaaaaaaaaaaay beyond what O-blah-blah predicted??
http://www.foxnews.com/politic.....t-numbers/
It’s a joke.
Obama just makes up numbers that don’t pan out time & time again.
What is the COST PER JOB of Porkulous??
Massive!!!!!!!
Do the math.
Oh, that’s right, LEFTIST PINHEADED KLOWNS don’t know how to do math. Math, cost justification, accountability have no placde in the Marxist playbook.
Obama and his ilk===
ruining America for our kids.
By the way, I’ve known quite a few people who consider trial attorneys to be greedy leeches on society, and have in the past insisted that the right to sue be reduced or eliminated in one form or another.
Until they find themselves on the other end, and they are seriously enjured in a car accident or by a doctor’s negligence, and the insurance company is ignoring them or offering nuisance value settlements. Then the trial lawyer is their best friend, and they quickly find that a contingent fee is the only way they (or anybody else) can afford to finance their case, especially since the attorney’s compensation is totally dependent upon either winning the case or forcing an adequate settlement.
re 1: Better the government than some profit driven factotem at a large corporation.
I just cannot fathom your sanguine approval of corporations making life and death decisions over your life, but not your duly alected government.
Did you vote for the little cipher in a corporate cubicle who decides if you shall get a treatment or not?
For example, when Lee Iacocca had the means to make his ‘private’ profit driven decision that exploding cars were an acceptable tradeoff for a little more profit, I would have hoped that the ‘gubmint’ might have had a word with him before he sold exploding Pintos and Mustangs to the unknowing public.
Cynical You are such a fucking tool.
re 5: Not-Supreme Court Justice Bork is suing the company that assembled a stage he was appearing on because he, stupidly, walked off the edge of the stage.
A very dramatic exit, but wholly unintentional.
He’s angry that they had not provided him with a helmet and other protective devices supplied ordinarily to the mentally handicapped.
I would love to hear Cynical’s defense of Bork’s lawsuit, as it would illustrate Cynical’s clinical insanity.
re 4: How about revoking the legal licenses and confiscating the fees of corporate lawyers who supply bogus letters of opinion that give CEO’s cover for performing illegal deeds.
rhp6033
I agree as long as there is some way to get the bad apples out of the bin – there are some doctors who really should have had their licenses yanked, but are allowed to continue to practice negligently. That needs to stop.
Goldy, are you ever going to comment on Caperton vs. Massey? Don’t you think the BIAW are crapping their panties over that?
@7 Yes, Mr. Klynical can talk to Bork about personal responsibility, Bork’s lawsuit, and about capping the fees paid to his nuisance suit-filing attorneys.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/.....yale-club/
RR @2:
Roger, I understand the sentiment, and agree that chain-gang work would do he a world of good. But I think he deserves somewhat better compensation, unless you think he’ll be able to serve out a 4,905,315-year sentence.
To show you just how immense an amount $4.3 billion is, even if Hank got the princely sum of $1000/hour for his work in leg-irons, and put every penny of it back into the pension fund, it would still take just under 500 years to pay it all back. And that’s without billing him for the interest, dividends, and capital gains that would accrue over a half-millennium.
Cynical: “How about CAPPING attorneys fees….and providing huge penalties to lawyers who file nuisance or even unsuccessful malpractice suits?”
I thought you believed in the magic of the market? Shouldn’t the market establish what is a reasonable fee for malpractice attorneys? Why should government get involved in private contractual relationships? Do we see some hypocrisy sneaking through your nonsense?
Seems to me that I remember seeing a few studies that refuted the idea that lawsuits were one of the main drivers in increasing heath-care costs.
Can’t seem to Google them up at the moment.
@1
There’s plenty of employers out there that want out of the healthcare biz. Mine included.
@1 What the hell do you think caps are? They’re government involvement in malpractice victims’ right to sue!
@3 Actually, the numbers I’ve seen indicate lawsuits account for only about 1% of health care costs. “Defensive medicine” practices by doctors afraid of being sued apparently cost a lot more than the aggregate total of verdicts. One way to make all of this — lawyers, lawsuits, verdicts, malpractice insurance — go away is to deal with health care injuries the same way our country decided over a century ago to deal with workplace injuries. Make it no-fault, have the government administer it, and if you’re hurt you’ll get medical treatment and your needs will be taken care of, period.
@1
Children’s hospital in Seattle in one of the best pediatric hospitals around and seeing how it’s run by the UW that makes it government run.
@16
Thanks!
@4 We already have huge penalties for attorneys who file frivolous or nuisance suits. It’s called Civil Rule 11 and disbarment.
@11 Everyone else gets 10 cents an hour on the chain gang, so why should he get $1,000 an hour?
@13 You saw correctly. The claim that lawsuits are responsible for high health care costs is wingnut bullshit peddled by rightwing proponents of so-called “tort reform.” Contingent-fee trial lawyers are virtually the only friend the average Joe has when a big corporation or a big hospital does him dirt. In this country, if some thieving businessman kills your kid with antifreeze-laced baby formula, at least you can sue his fucking ass … and even better, a jury of peers can make you the proud new owner of the baby formula factory if they want to. I like this system. It keeps people with crooked hearts a little more honest.
In China, they shot the crooks who adultered the baby milk. That ain’t such a bad idea, either.
@15
The current crop of righties are big on limiting personal freedoms. Can’t marry someone they don’t approve of. Abortion-forget it. Wronged by a corporation, sorry you can’t sue (wasn’t Love Canal tort law?). Want to smoke a little weed at the Dave Matthews show at the Gorge- forget it. By a house in the country and want your neighborhood to stay country? Good luck with that when Quadrant buys up 40 acres next door and wants to put 160 houses on it (The GMA and CAO were hard fought for and are a good idea).
38% of Republicans think Republicans suck.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/120.....Party.aspx
Public Notice
Roger Rabbit may have to take a leave of absence from saving America from wingnut traitor trolls in the near future.
I was notified by Sister Rabbit today to go on standby travel alert. Poppa Rabbit, who is almost 100 years old and lives in an Old Bunnies Home in another state, is feeling poorly and has been looking up at the sky, where the Great Mother Rabbit Spirit lives, quite a lot lately.
One never knows about these things, but I’m gonna throw a few things into my designer carry-on bag, in case I have to call the airport shuttle on short notice.
In the meantime, I will carry on my vital work here, and hope this turns out to be a false alarm. I would like to see my pop make it to 100, which nobody in my family has ever done, I mean it would be a real shame to have come this far and then fall short by a whisker.
Medical malpractice lawsuits is one of those issues that produce a visceral reaction on the part of wingnuts which is completely divorced from reality–like their reaction to global warming and evolution. This reaction is best summed up as follows: fuck facts. Medical malpractice lawsuits, and the related “defensive medicine” are such an insignificant part of the health insurance crisis that ignoring the issue is a perfectly sensible approach.
Roger @ 24: My prayers will be with you and your father.
@26 Indeed. Best wishes.
Rabbit,
Best to you. Perhaps it’s even worth buying Pops some of those fresh organic carrots that the older generation always feels is just too much luxury.
Your family is in my prayers.
God speed.
Hey Pelletizer, Godspeed on jo daddy. I hope he pulls through as you only have one parental unit set.
Free health care usually hurts those that need it the most…
Ta’Shon Rain Little Light, a happy little girl who loved to dance and dress up in traditional American Indian clothes, had stopped eating and walking. She complained constantly to her mother that her stomach hurt.
When Stephanie Little Light took her daughter to the Indian Health Service clinic in this wind-swept and remote corner of Montana, they told her the 5-year-old was depressed.
Ta’Shon’s pain rapidly worsened and she visited the clinic about 10 more times over several months before her lung collapsed and she was airlifted to a children’s hospital in Denver. There she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, confirming the suspicions of family members.
…
On some reservations, the oft-quoted refrain is “don’t get sick after June,” when the federal dollars run out.
For those that don’t know…
This isn’t a shot at obama/democrats, it’s a shot at the free health care system.
17 Let’s not forget Harborview, which is jointly run by the UW and King County. If you drop on the street with a heart attack in these parts, or get really busted up or badly burned in an accident, you want to be hauled to their ER/trauma center because your odds for survival are better there than just about any other place on the planet.
In fact, it’s pretty darn hard to die of a heart attack in Seattle, thanks to the origination here of the Medic One and Medic Two programs, cooked up by folks whose paychecks came from the big bad gubmint.
11 The really shocking part of all that is, the guy basically walked off with that much money and practically escaped notice.
Marvin @ 31
Should the family be permitted to sue the Indian Health Service for malpractice? Should there be a cap on damages or a cap on attorney’s fees (for the plaintiff’s attorney, but not the defense attorney)? Would a lack of a remedy for the deceased child’s family improve the health care offered on reservations (or anywhere else for that matter)?
@31
Do you think there aren’t story’s about people dying from very preventable things among the zillons of uninsured in America?
I’d be willing to be that there are more people dying from easily preventable causes among the uninsured than there are among the insured.
re 31: This is a perfect opportunity for the free market for profit clinics to shine and show how good they are compared to the government.
Where were they during this whole thing, and why did the government money run out?
Tax cuts for the rich.
Thanks, everyone. You too, trolls, you are showing some heart and class tonight.
Heavenly Father, I lift up Rog’s Dad to you tonight Lord…that Your will be done in his life and that he knows you Lord. Comfort Rog and his entire family as they support and give love to the family patriarch. Angels of protection around Rog and all his family members as they travel to visit Dad.
Lord, 100 years is a long time for a man…but merely a blink of an eye to you our Eternal Father. I pray all of us come to know You and know you better.
Amen
re 38: According to Jesus, public prayer is worthless and self-serving.
I pray that Cynical will take to his heart not only that he is forgiven, but to go and sin no more, as well.