What a crock.

You want to cap malpractice rates, fine. The reason there are any malpractice insurers in California at all is the cap, to the extent it is effective, was preceded by tort reform.

If you tried to cap insurance rates in states that don’t have tort reform, the insurance companies would disappear in a second.

I say IGNORANCE, once again, because, despite saying it again, and again, and again, and again………it doesn’t sink in, does it?

Large business entities ALREADY have tort reform. My states’ medical school and hospital limit their TOTAL liability, let alone the pain and suffering advocated in all tort reform proposals. Many other states do the same thing.

Big business insulates itself from malpractice exposure via ERISA. You want to get rid of that, fine, I’d LOVE to see ERISA eliminated. Or at least kept away from health insurance…..maybe there was some usefulness to that law when applied to retirement plans, as I recall, that was the original intent.

I am fully aware of business control of medicine, thank you very much. If you think it’s a good idea to have business in control of medicines, keep the status quo. The tort environment will kill off the independent physician, while big business entities and government will insulate themselves from liability. They will then offer the independent physicians shelter from the storm that government and business created in the first place.

Somehow, I wonder if forcing physicians into government employ is what you want after all.

Bill Frist’s holdings are of no concern to me. He put the holdings in a blind trust when he was elected, to stay away from any conflict-of-interest charges. Apparently that’s not good enough for you. Frankly, I don’t care if he owns HCA and affiliates and subsidiaries, has interest in those businesses, or has the proceeds of that business in trust. The idea remains valid.

Study after study after study may be found, and cited ad nauseam.

Do you even have the slightest interest in reading them?

(Frist has thirteen mil? Is that all? John Kerry could buy a six-pack of Frists)

BTW, California also capped the amount the insurance companies could charge docs. What does that prove?

what concrete action can physicians do to stop this non-sense.?

My state medical school and hospital has TOTAL liability limited, by statute, to far less than the proposed limit on NONECONOMIC damages in all tort reform schemes proposed and enacted.

Now this “corporation” consists of ME. No one else. I am a solo physician. I would like at least as much protection as our medical school. You know them, the people who provide much better medical care. Oh, and the private religious-affiliated hospitals nearby provide more charity care, in case you were thinking about going there with the argument. The state’s rural hospitals do more government-entitlement medical care (Medicare and Medicaid) on a percentage basis of total medical care delivered. I have a hard time referring my Medicaid patients to our medical center. Gotta prove no one else nearby will accept it.

When we say that tort reform “works” we mean not only studies by the General Accounting Office, Health and Human Services, the state of Florida, among other studies. We mean not only studies that were commissioned by people against tort reform, only to find results contrary to their outlook (the GAO study and Senator Durbin of Illinois).

We mean “proved” by over 20 years experience in states that have had tort reform. California and Indiana come to mind.

We mean “proved” in that we now have seen several states that have had tort reform passed, in effect for years, overturned on legal challenge, and reinstated after several more years. The malpractice insurance rates, as well as availability of insurance and the medical services that go with it, roller-coaster up and down with the state’s tort law.

The states that have tort reform, the patients still get their day in court. Economic damages continue to be paid, and noneconomic damages are being paid in something more closely resembling reason. Egregious malpractice is still dealt with by punitive damages.

California’s experience shows MORE lawsuits than my state, but for smaller noneconomic damages. This leaves more money in the system for economic damages.

So more people get money from medical error. Isn’t that what you would want, or are you more interested in a windfall in the trial lawyer’s pocket?

I for one am your basic solo doc. I’m a “coprporation” as in a professional corporation. Not much different from how your lawyer or accountant or dentist incorporate.

As usual for the cheap shot artists, you call us “corporations” trying to lump us in with Enron or something. Buy off a judge or senator? That’s beneath contempt.

Of COURSE limits on noneconomic damages ‘works’. When favored corporations are protected from living up to their responsibilities it ALWAYS saves them money. Great, they can save up to buy a senator or a judge.
The ‘we-know-who-the-culprits-are’ argument smells like the ‘few-bad-apples’ argument.
As long as you allow bizniz to run medicine and healthcare, its purpose will be perverted towards the bottom line.
Fix the system – stop trying to bail a sinking ship.

Limits on noneconomic damages works. Period.

In West Virginia, in Nevada, New Jersey, I don’t know how many other states, doctors dropped the ball on tort reform when they chose to show “good faith” to people who wouldn’t know what good faith was if it bit them in the arse. The second the docs walk away, the politicos will say the crisis is over and do presicely NOTHING.

I hope doctors don’t make the same mistake in Maryland.

Physicians need to stand firm and unrelenting in their efforts to battle this malpractice curse.

Liberals, abetted by their fawning columnists of the same persuasion, have been spreading false information to make it appear the insurance companies are all behnid this crisis. What they don’t tell the public is an obscene tort system that has gone out of control, with most of those malpractice premiums going to the pockets of a few trial lawyers.

The failure to find a sensible solution will only aggravate a rapidly escalating problem. When that day comes when women can no longer find obstetricians to deliver their babies, when patients can no longer find access to high-risk specialists, it may be too late to salvage a system that has served the interests of America well.

We all know, of course, who the culprits are!