Tort Reform

Health care anyone? Only if you can get past the insurance costs. I read this last week where doctors are paying annual insurance premiums of 300,000 dollars. Who do you think pays for those costs? Hint: it is not the insurance companies or the doctors who pay it.

Lawyers are waiting in the emergency room hallways for “tickets to riches”. Many times the costs are settled for hundreds of thousands of dollars out of court. When they do go through the courts, it can quickly add to millions in fees. Many times most of these fees are prorated enormously in the lawyer’s favor, not in the sick defendant’s favor. Who do you think pays the lawyers fees? Hint: it is not the sick patients paying the fees.

One of my biggest concerns is in all this talk of reform no one, not one responsible spokesman, is talking about ways of limiting these costs. Why isn’t there one person talking about the crime of lawyers enriching their coffers from the sick and the dead? It is a crime to allow the moneysuckers to drain the health system without any safety checks. Who do you think pays for extra costs? Hint: it is not the doctors or the insurance companies who pay litigation costs.

Obama is correct in one respect; many times today doctors order tests for patients that they really do not think are needed. The doctors are afraid not to order these tests because they fear being sued. If they are successfully sued, their insurance costs can rise dramatically. Our health system is bogged down with all sorts of testing which does not need to take place. Who do you think pays for all the tests? Hint: it is not the doctor.

However, what we do not need is public rationing of health care. I lost my father and my father in law recently, but in both cases, the health system was working and spending to prolong their lives. With rationed care, the federal bureaucrat will cut off the most expensive expenditures; the older patient in the last year of his life, is the most expensive.

Further, I have had two brothers with aggressive cancers (both are in remission). I am concerned with any system change which will be great at covering basic ailment care, but will not provide for drastic needs. Drastic needs are the “all consuming cost” of health care. Under a centralized system, drastic needs are the first to be cut. The proof is in the people from those systems in other countries who come to the United States to get care not offered in rationed systems.

In any case, I will be a lot more likely to believe the reformers if they were serious about removing the hideous-lawyer-leech that is sucking the lifeblood out of the best health care system in the world. Until that time, this citizen will remain dubious about “reform”. After all, I am an expert on reform—I am an educator—and we have been “reforming” education for more than 100 years. To the politicians who want change I would say, look where it took public schools before you choose to send our health system there.