...There are other, more serious costs and not just in health care, according to “Jackpot Justice: The True Cost of America’s Tort System,” a new study from the conservative Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. The study is the most comprehensive ever done on the direct and indirect costs of allowing personal liability lawyers virtual free rein in our courts in recent decades, according to the PRI. Among the other health care costs calculated by the PRI are an estimated 3.4 million people who can’t get insurance because of excessive premiums and, worst of all, 114,000 people who “would be alive and working today, but are not due to inefficiencies in the tort system over the last two decades” that delayed critically needed new drugs and treatments.
Overall, tort abuse costs the American people $865 billion a year, or $2.4 billion 365 days a year. That’s 27 times as much as the federal government spends protecting Americans from terrorists each year, 30 times what the National Institutes for Health spends annually researching cures for deadly diseases and 13 times the amount devoted to school aid by the Education Department. The losses include 51,000 jobs destroyed by asbestos-related litigation alone, plus the $559 million in pensions those workers would have received. Then there is the $684 billion in lost shareholder value and 367 billion in lost product sales due to lowered research investment.
Don't worry, most likely when there is a quasi single payer plan there will develop a "Worker's Comp" form of redress for medical errors. Without Worker's Compensation no one could hire anyone. Million dollar law suits would wipe out small business.
As you know, on the job illnesses, injuries and deaths are easily and promptly handled in most states by paying attorneys for the claimant and having benefits defined in advance. Physicians could pay their "workers comp-like" premiums to some state agency, or better yet fees would be assessed per procedure for some high risk specialties.
The trial lawyers will fight it, but the alternative will be no one willing to take on patients at risk for bad outcomes. Obstetricians, Neurosurgeons, and orthopods are all endangered species. Sometimes the cause is nonfeasance, malfeasance or misfeasance; however, there is a certain, predictable bad outcome of one sort or another with many surgical procedures. In spite of this juries practice "bootleg humanitarianism" and give give outrageous awards with little or no cause.