Genuine Healthcare Reform Starts by Reigning in the Lawyers

2/9/2010 | EnderWiggins

[OafOfOffice]

We have had TORT reform (MICRA) in California since 1976.
We have the highest healthcare costs in all of the states. Except maybe Mass who has universal coverage and their costs since have gone up 42%.

Attorney’s do not take malpractice cases here unless there is a death or brain damage for the most part. MICRA is called a license to kill by many harmed by negligence or ignorance. One attorney in SF, his dad (a attorney who founded the practice)was killed through physician negligence. He knew not to fight it because the court would say he was old anyway.

Someone can accidentally slip on your property and make out a like bandit in the courts. A doctor can be so negligent they don’t read records and destroy a persons life and there is nothing you can do about it in California.

The other side of the coin is in one state with no tort reform, you can have microscopic surgery (gastric bypass)and sue for two small scars and get 9 million. Utterly ridiculous.

Our costs will be lowered when people are forced to pay for uncompensated care. Our illegal’s cost us probably a billion a year alone in California. And they walk away owing not one penny.

People don’t want to pay for health insurance, that’s fine too. But be willing to lose everything if you get a catastrophic illness. Personal responsibility. Why is the responsible the only ones who pay up in Obama’s policies?!?!

We also need to make it possible to shop across state lines for insurance to be competitive. Pay for what you want in your plan. If you are a nutcase (most progressives) You will want mental healthcare. If you are John Edwards you will want marriage counseling added.

We can make available catastrophic coverage for those who don’t want all expenses paid.

Health savings account that roll over each year are great for people in good health.

Malpractice is about 5% of the problem. You want reality, go to any ER, and ask how many have insurance coverage. Then ask how padded the bill of the patients who do have insurance will be because of the uninsured. 400% and up.

[OafOfOffice]

Yeah, its much better in Canada when the physicians stand around and wonder if a MRI or CScan is needed (costs too high)while the patient dies.

[steelyourfaith]

Any attempt to address healthcare costs should begin by extracting the parasites, and TORT REFORM would be the common-sense, obvious place to start ... yet no where in the thousands of ugly pages of Big Government healthcare reform drafts will you find a single reference to tort reform.

[the long march]

We don’t need any additional foreign doctors ( that will end us up like the UK). Everything else is correct

[the long march]

Yup. And at the end of the fiscal year if you are still around they will send you across the border to those ‘lousy’ but free US hospitals

[Question Liberal Authority]

You might be right, but it frosts me that immigration of professional, skilled workers is tightly controlled, while unskilled workers can pour through the border like it's a sieve.

Anyway, if, over the past 20 years, we had systematically sucked the best and brightest doctors away from England, Canada, Sweden and the other countries with socialized medicine, we could have broken the back of those health care systems, and now they would be seeking to be more free-market-oriented instead of us trying to be more socialist.

[the long march]

The next time you think British doctor be sure and realize that the best and brightest are already in the States practising. the UK is full of Pakis and other foreign docs who are ill trained and ill suited for Western medicine.

As to illegals coming across the border, that is only a ‘health care’ issue on the periphery. It is truly a matter of sovereignty