February 26, 2010
This is going to be political
Health care is something that is just about always on my mind. I can’t really help it, I deal with it literally every day of my life. Did I mention I don’t work in either 1) the health care industry or 2) my company’s HR department. But everyone reading this is aware of my medical situation I would guess.
So, I try to stay on top of health care related news. Good for me, there’s a lot of it going on right now… namely reform.
I have my own set of opinions on what I think may or may not work when it comes to reforming health care, but mostly they are just gut feelings and so aside from debating them with another politically interested friend, I try to keep them in check. But there is one thing I can’t keep in anymore, and I wish my blog had a wider audience to read this.
Medical Malpractice. I’m going to be upfront and say that I am currently involved in a suit. If you know about it, then you know what I am talking about. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask me and I’ll let you know.
I can’t take anyone who says we need to implement more reform as a way to “reign in health care costs” seriously. It is physically impossible for me to do so. It’s a reasonable idea on it’s conservative face, but as far as I can see at the very best it would do absolutely nothing. Much more likely though is it would do far more harm than good.
The first problem, how well has it worked so far. Tort reform isn’t a new idea. States like Utah, Texas and California all have a significant number of laws already on the books limiting a patient’s ability to sue a medical provider. As best as I can tell, all three enacted reform starting in the 1970’s and continuing on til today. Yet, here we are today attempting to reform health care because it is still too expensive. I suppose we could enact MORE reform and perhaps that would enable savings, but that leads to the next point.
In general the “system” (regardless if it’s health care, the car industry, financial companies, etc…) is stacked very much in favor of the “Big Guy”. They have the money and they have the lawyers so therefore they also have the politicians. Suing a company isn’t cheap, it isn’t easy, and the laws are designed (here at least) so that the company already begins with an edge. It would be nice if all companies were altruistic and really did try to do “good”, but the reality is that most companies are in the business to make profits. In that case it is a balance or risk versus reward. Until the malpractice act becomes criminal, the only recourse I am aware of that a customer has is 1) stop using the product i.e. boycott or 2) sue the business.
A boycott makes sense if nothing bad has happened to the customer yet, but that’s not what is being discussed. If a patient loses a limb because of a surgical mistake, you can’t just not to go that doctor anymore and just expect everything to be better. It’s also not just a simple matter of going to some website to see if a certain doctor has had problems in the past. Hospitals work hard to keep that sort of information hidden from view.
In my opinion, limiting a patient’s ability to sue, not only hurts the patient, but it helps protect bad doctors. I’m sure that after a certain number of complaints a hospital might feel compelled to do something. However, if you want to truly limit the number of medical mistakes, eliminating bad doctors as soon as possible has to be at the top of your list. This point is largely speculation and I have no real data to back it up (truthiness if you will).
But neither of the previous points matter when you consider how little money is actually saved. The CBO (i.e. Congressional Budget Office… further i.e. the guys that do the numbers behind any reasonable piece of legislation among other things) was given a piece of legislation to analyze that included significant tort reform. They analyzed not only how much money would be saved on lawsuits, but also how much would be saved on malpractice insurance and defensive medicine. The last bit has been the Republicans talking point for as long as I have been paying attention.
The number they came back with was 54 billion dollars over the next 10 years. To be fair this is more money than I will ever see in my life. Probably a thousand times more money than I will ever see. But compared to what health care costs it is less than nothing. Last year the rough cost of health care in the US was 2.5 trillion dollars. I have seen published estimates that in 10 years that number will be closer to 4.5 trillion. If you assume linear growth and sum up the total over 10 years it adds up to nearly 40 trillion dollars.
40,000,000,000,000
Just to give you an idea what that might look like, check out this link then take the final picture and stack it on top of itself 40 times. I have trouble fathoming how much money that is. Astounding.
But consider that 54 billion dollars against it. Percentage-wise it works out to be roughly 0.14%. That’s less than one fifth of one percent.
SOOOOOOOO we take away patient rights doing something that we already know won’t fix the problem and even when it works exactly as planned it still only takes care of a tenth of a percent of the problem… And somehow this is necessary to start health care reform? Can someone please explain that to me???
Until then, I will continue to feel the same. If people want to have a serious, rational discussion about health care, then leave tort out of it.
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