Do you mean that physician’s care isn’t a public utility, like running water and electricity? Writers like Herbert reflect a recent pattern of thinking that reflect a poverty of understanding and experience of the larger world, people so isolated by privilege and convenience that they have no understanding how extraordinarily fortunate they are to have at their disposal the expertise in medical care they have. Lots of people elsewhere wish they were so lucky.

We have been inculcated with the idea that medical care is a product, just like a car, for which the “customer” should have guaranteed expectations of “performance”. Price is irrelevant. And the liberal press and their trial-bar bedfellows provide written reassurance of this. Never mind that guaranteenig health or perfect results is like guaranteeing the weather.

It is possible to drive the costs of medical care to a point where it is no longer available. We are beginning to see this in many places in the US already. Will we live to regret letting this kind of thing happen? Probably. The problem then will be what happens next. You see, when you really do need that neurosurgeon right now, realizing that the system is broken won’t help you when that surgeon just isn’t there for you.

Forgive me for intruding upon this bit of choir practice (as in: preaching to choirs), but I need to say something about RGL’s vacuous comments:

But then I even doubt whether enlightening these liberal eggheads would make a dent in cracking their crusty anti-physician prejudices.

Liberals are anti-physician? I would have thought that the conservatives, who support strict HMO second-guessing of physicians’ medical decisions, and who oppose doctors’ and patients’ efforts to ensure that HMOs are held accountable for their anti-physician, anti-patient profit-maximization schemes, needed their crusty anti-physician prejudices cracked first.

One problem for anyone advocating malpractice tort reform is that this issue has been co-opted by the right wing’s overall hostility to anyone other than large corporations having access to the courts.

Malpractice reformers would enjoy more strategic success if they stopped trying to sound like Rush Limbaugh, and spent more time trying to persuade everyone that doctors are really on the side of patients, and not just out for themselves.

Here’s another link on fixing the tort system, from HHS:

http://aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/litrefm.htm

Herbert on med-mal, cont’d
Martin Grace of Georgia State provides more details (series of posts begins Jun. 21) to back up one of the points Jim makes below, namely “that the medmal insurance market is owned to a major extent by the doctors though…

I’m so sick and tired of this. There is no human enterprise that does as much to prevent error as does medicine. Don’t even start with the aviation industry. The day I’m allowed to permanently retire the aging “airplanes” I see in my office can we make a comparison with the two endeavors. The day I’m allowed to mandate preventive maintenance on my patients, prohibit self-destructive practices, maybe then we can compare medical error with pilot error.

Oh, and when you are injured in an air crash, your damages are limited. Read your airline ticket. The airlines had their own version of “tort reform” decades ago. If even one airliner crashed, if the passengers individually could sue for the millions they can get in medical errors, even one crash could bankrupt the airline.

The 40 thousand or 50 thousand or 98 thousand deaths a year caused by medical error is based on the JUNK SCIENCE paper called “To Err is Human” from the “prestigious” Institute of Medicine. They took, what was it, about 200 deaths in Boston from a couple decades ago, looked for ANY medical error during the care and made the leap of faith that the error CAUSED the death (dying cancer patient, doc gives two tylenol’s instead of one, that error caused the death) then extrapolates that to the rest of the country.

The IOM study is politically motivated garbage. The number of deaths caused by medical error is not zero but an order of magnitude less than the tens of thousands mentioned.

No one wants to reduce medical error more than physicians. But if we don’t get tort reform, there will be zero medical error because there will be zero medicine practiced.

Why not direct our efforts on TORT REFORM, which has been PROVEN, over and over again, to reduce the cost of malpractice insurance, while allowing injured patients compensation for their injury?