MORE Bush LIES: The Phony Tort Reform Crisis

Good health, a sound body, life itself are all priceless. No amount of money can compensate you for unnecessarily losing a function or body part. And that's what the Bush Administration and its medical industry allies think too. Under their proposed "tort reform" legislation, you'll receive virtually nothing if you're butchered by a careless doctor. A jury can award two classes of damages to a victim of medical malpractice: economic and punitive. Economic damages compensate a patient for future wages lost as a result of a doctor's mistake; punitive awards account for other victims who may not have sued, They also send a warning to other doctors not to behave negligently. Bush wants to slap a limit on economic damages, but with the average household earning about $40,000 a year, lost wages tend to be relatively low. The current proposal focuses on the punitive component because it comprises the biggest part of large damage awards. Bush wants to limit punitive damages to $250,000. "This liability system, I'm telling you, is out of control," Bush says. "Because the system is so unpredictable, there is a constant risk of being hit by a massive jury award. It's costly for the doctors, it's costly for small businesses, it's costly for hospitals, it is really costly for patients." First it's Iraq. Then Social Security. Now more lies to create a phony torts crisis. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office  finds that the costs associated with malpractice--buying insurance and paying out damage awards--amounts to less than two percent of America's skyrocketing healthcare expenses. "Even a reduction of 25 percent to 30 percent in malpractice costs would lower healthcare costs by only about 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent, and the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small," the CBO determined. That's chump change--a mere five bucks out of the $900 I blow on health insurance each month. [more]