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]
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