Government meddling did not generate the practice of malpractice law. Malpractice law causes doctors to practice defensive medicine. You go to a doc with a headache, you probably get a catscan and maybe a brain MRI, just to protect him from the 1 in 5 million chance that you have a tumor and he sent you home with aspirin for a few days to see if it got worse. The costs of this multiplied across the country are what causes the problem.
The government is not going to cap lawsuit awards. It's not going to happen.
Healthcare insurance IS going to be an enormous issue of 2008 -- and frankly, from a conservative perspective -- is SHOULD be. It is consuming resources that could be used to grow more valuable areas of the US economy. Like technology. Or weapons systems.
It is taking money out of the hands of entrepreneurs. It is taking money out of the hands of self employed people who are conservative by nature and don't like taking orders.
See, folks in group plans do not understand this. If you go to a company and hire on, the health plan there HAS to take you. There are usually no pre-existing condition exclusions for group plans.
But if you you try to get an individual policy . . . if you've had something as common as high blood pressure in the past, the insurer can either exclude you, or more ugly, take you on but exclude anything related to that pre-existing condition, and folks, that is just about everything. They can collect a premium from you and pay for nothing. Have a heart attack? They don't pay. Have a stroke? They don't pay. Have kidney problems? They won't pay. Pretty much everything could derive from high bp.
Folks This Is the Norm. This is not some fringe number of people. Group plan employees in companies are a small and getting smaller minority of the working population. This is not an issue about welfare types. This is about people with "jobs".
Another thing, folks, more and more people -- baby boomers -- are taking early retirement. That is defined as any age under 65. Medicare kicks in at 65, but not until 65. Folks who want to stop working earlier have to have an individual policy -- and if they had pre-existing conditions they can't get one for less than enormous costs.
The GOP has to have a solution on this or we will lose this issue.