None of the health care reform plans being debated to take into consideration the interrelatedness of insuring Lower healthcare costs and the tort system, despite the fact that all but one of the reform proposals includes tort reform measures.
The American public appears prepared for ample reform of its health care delivery system, having been spooked, to some extent, by the panorama of some impending crises. The foremost crisis is of costs that medical expenditures are overriding a terrifyingly large and yet larger part of the nation's possessions. In 1993, Americans spent approximately four thousand dollar per person on health care for a total of $942.5 billion. Over the precedent forty years, spending for health care has grown three percent faster than expenditures for all other goods and services; such spending now accounts for thirteen percent of all spending in the U.S. economy. If the existing rate of growth continues, health care expenditures will devour almost a third of GNP by the year 2030.
The subsequent crisis is the professed failure of the ever more oppressive tort system we use to allocate liability for medical malpractice and to recompense sufferers of care-related injuries. The cost of malpractice insurance has skyrocketed over the past twenty years: physicians now pay more than five billion dollar yearly in insurance premiums, and hospitals spend roughly half again as much. The indirect costs of malpractice liability are even higher. "Defensive medicine" tests and procedures provided primarily to minimize the chance of future litigation may cost the country an additional fifteen billion dollar each year.
In certain medical specialties and geographic areas disproportionately burdened by insurance costs, shortages have developed where physicians have stopped performing services because of liability concerns. Furthermore, most critics agree that despite these heavy costs, the current system of tort liability does.....
