AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

@maporsche,

maporsche, when liability insurance for doctors can run into hundreds of thousands per year, it seems that intuition or common sense alone could tell us something is haywire and needs fixing. And also to believe that such premiums do not drive up cost of medical care and that the right kind of reform could not or would not bring costs down, that seem like a very big pill to swallow. My brother was a doctor, he retired years ago, and he said his $25,000 annual premium was very low compared to others by virtue of the fact that he had a good track record with no lawsuits, and that he did not specialize in high risk areas, such as brain or heart surgery or delivery of babies. I have understood that the high premiums have driven many doctors out of some areas, such as delivering babies, so it is not only premiums that drive up costs but also the lack of competition or numbers of doctors in some areas also drives up cost.

2 Replies

@maporsche,

But they were over 110%. You should read his link; after three tort reforms, their insurance premiums are still growing much faster than their wages. Health care reform is a must; it's not an option. because more people are losing their health insurance. Tort reform is a straw man diversion; that's not where the real savings are.

1 Reply

@okie,

okie, Show evidence that doctors are paying "hundreds of thousands of dollars" on insurance.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

I did a quick search on Google, and found that okie is right on this one! Couldn't believe it until reading several articles about malpractice insurance; doctors are being screwed by both the insurance companies and HMOs. Health care reform is needed more than ever!

0 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

You just said it was 100%.

If the big TORT reform was in 2003, it's disengeneous to measure the increase from 1999.

I'm also not sure that measuring insurance premiums as compared to wages is the most accurate way to analyze the cost of health care. You're adding another variable to this equation. Someone could argue that maybe the problem is that wages have been surpressed.

2 Replies

@maporsche,

maporsche wrote:

You just said it was 100%.

If the big TORT reform was in 2003, it's disengeneous to measure the increase from 1999.

I'm also not sure that measuring insurance premiums as compared to wages is the most accurate way to analyze the cost of health care. You're adding another variable to this equation. Someone could argue that maybe the problem is that wages have been surpressed.

Well, there was 'big' Tort reform in 95, 99, and 03; and insurance premiums and health care costs never dropped the entire time.

If the country rose 100% on average, and TX rose 90%, that's not meaningfully different. Everyone under that system is still getting fucked to roughly the same amount.

Even if wages were to rise more, nothing should go up in cost 7-15% per year, every year, in perpetuity. It's the sign of an extremely broken system, and Tort reform doesn't do a single thing to change this.

I'm not against Tort reform - if it can be shown that it is necessary and the right thing to do, on it's own merits. But the idea that it somehow saves money for consumers is a joke. It certainly does not seem to have done so.

Cycloptichorn

2 Replies

@Cycloptichorn,

In all seriousness cyclops, if home remodelers would have to start paying a hundred grand or so for liability insurance, you don't think home remodeling prices would go up? Come on, you need to have some ability to reason.

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

How can you say that a 10% difference isn't meaningful?

TORT reform was inacted and costs increased more slowly (at least compared to the rest of the nation). Maybe it has nothing to do with TORT reform, maybe it does.

I think TORT reform should be added into the Insurance Reform bill that congress is considering now. If for no other reason, then to make it's passage more likely. If you added the public option and let the Republicans add in TORT reform, you may have enough votes in the Senate to get the PO passed.

3 Replies

@maporsche,

maporsche wrote:

How can you say that a 10% difference isn't meaningful?

How many standard deviations is it from the average? That should tell us if it's meaningful. I'm no statistician, though, and have no time to crunch numbers.

Quote:

TORT reform was inacted and costs increased more slowly (at least compared to the rest of the nation). Maybe it has nothing to do with TORT reform, maybe it does.

Another thing to look at would be how Texas's rate of increase compared to the nation's before 2003.

Quote:

I think TORT reform should be added into the Insurance Reform bill that congress is considering now. If for no other reason, then to make it's passage more likely. If you added the public option and let the Republicans add in TORT reform, you may have enough votes in the Senate to get the PO passed.

But tort reform can (depending on the measures) have serious negative consequences for individuals harmed by malpractice. That has to be weighed. If we're doing something that harms individuals for no clear benefit that's an obvious error. Worse if we're just doing it to placate political sentiments.

1 Reply

@FreeDuck,

FreeDuck wrote:

But tort reform can (depending on the measures) have serious negative consequences for individuals harmed by malpractice. That has to be weighed. If we're doing something that harms individuals for no clear benefit that's an obvious error. Worse if we're just doing it to placate political sentiments.

Surely, and we could probably look to Texas to see how individuals have been treated under their system.

I'll add though, that we do A LOT to placate politice sentiments. Not that I agree with any of them, but this wouldn't be anything new.

0 Replies

@maporsche,

maporsche, You must learn to remember what somebody writes or copy and paste, because you are wrong. What I wrote was

Quote:

individual's share of insurance went up over 100%

You have also failed to read the article after I suggested you read it.

You failed on two points.

You're trying too hard to prove your point without understanding the issue being discussed, and misquoting what I wrote. It's too tedious trying to explain things to you when you 1) fail to understand what I really said, and 2) you don't read the articles to get you up to speed that was "suggested" by two people. The first post addressed to you with the link, and my follow-up suggestion for you to read the article.

1 Reply

@okie,

okie wrote:

In all seriousness cyclops, if home remodelers would have to start paying a hundred grand or so for liability insurance, you don't think home remodeling prices would go up? Come on, you need to have some ability to reason.

No, Okie, I think that if the insurance that they currently carry suddenly went down 15%, they would not drop their prices accordingly - unless they were forced to.

And it's a bad analogy, anyway, b/c home remodeling is a market in which consumers have the ability to make direct cost comparisons; and health care most certainly is not such a market.

When consumers have no immediate ability to make choices based on price, there is much, much less pressure to bring costs down - people have very little ability to see that you have done so, and can't afford not to get their health issues addressed.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@maporsche,

maporsche wrote:

How can you say that a 10% difference isn't meaningful?

Like this: 10% is not a meaningful difference in the rate of rise of health insurance costs.

Quote:

TORT reform was inacted and costs increased more slowly (at least compared to the rest of the nation). Maybe it has nothing to do with TORT reform, maybe it does.

There's no proof that it does, just speculation.

Quote:

I think TORT reform should be added into the Insurance Reform bill that congress is considering now. If for no other reason, then to make it's passage more likely. If you added the public option and let the Republicans add in TORT reform, you may have enough votes in the Senate to get the PO passed.

I don't believe that for a second. If you give them an inch, they will simply demand a mile. Every time the Dems have given in on an issue, they have not attracted Republicans to support their bills one bit, in this new Congress. Not even a little.

That being said, I'd agree to horse-trade it, IF it can be shown to get actual votes. I doubt it will.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

All true; what we as consumers do not see are the actual charges from the hospital when the government pays the bills. Without consumer involvement, providing services to Medicare beneficiaries takes out the audit component of the system. If the hospital performs surgery A, but charges for surgery A and B, plus all the supplemental charges, there's no one to question whether the charges are legitimate or not.

This is but only one of the efficiencies missing from the current system that must be reformed.

0 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

I read both articles.

The first one is from 1999 and says that nationwide, healthcare premiums went up by 131%, Freeduck crunched some numbers to make it more accurate to the year 2000 report and came up with 101% increase (I do not have the time to verify his accuracy).

The second one is from 2000 and has a Texas specific report that says that healthcare premiums in Texas went up 91.6%.

Nationwide = 101%
Texas = 91.6%

I then said that if the significant TORT reform didn't take effect until 2003, it's not good analysis to compare numbers from before 2003, unless you're using it to establish a baseline (for example, if Texas was always 10% below the National average, then them remaining at 10% below the average after 2003 would show that TORT reform had no significant difference, assuming no other factors).

I'm fully aware of the issue I'M discussing; which I've stated is not the issue that you're discussing with ican. YOU'VE failed to understand THAT.

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

There's no proof that it does, just speculation.

Right. Which is why I've suggested that we as a collective invest some time trying to disect that particular aspect of this discussion, rather than brow-beat a particular poster over an obviously inaccurate statement.

I don't know about you, but I'm actually interested in if TORT reform can reduce costs in the long term. Even moreso if our government is going to be footing the bill.

If you're interested in trying to learn something, then please partake in this dicusssion. Otherwise I'll leave you to your pointless arguing and even go as far as to declare you the winner of whatever it is you're trying to accomplish. That should make you feel good.

1 Reply

@maporsche,

=No, you don't know what you are discussing, because the cost of malpractice cost to health care is less than 2-3%. How does that suddenly become 10%?

1 Reply

@maporsche,

maporsche wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

There's no proof that it does, just speculation.

Right. Which is why I've suggested that we as a collective invest some time trying to disect that particular aspect of this discussion, rather than brow-beat a particular poster over an obviously inaccurate statement.

I don't know about you, but I'm actually interested in if TORT reform can reduce costs in the long term. Even moreso if our government is going to be footing the bill.

If you're interested in trying to learn something, then please partake in this dicusssion. Otherwise I'll leave you to your pointless arguing and even go as far as to declare you the winner of whatever it is you're trying to accomplish. That should make you feel good.

Relax, relax.

I've seen the amount that Tort and liability costs, as a percentage of total healthcare, pegged at 2%. Tort costs have not risen significantly in the last decade, and health insurance is still rising super-fast. I don't see how addressing this 2% - let's be overly generous and call it 5% - is going to make a meaningful difference in the rise of healthcare costs. It doesn't even follow logically.

I find the idea that Tort reform will reduce costs to any meaningful degree to be laughable, it's like the fools who wanted to balance the budget by attacking Earmarks. There's not a shot in hell that this will reduce costs significantly, it's attacking an extremely small part of the problem. Tort reform is mostly designed to provide greater profits for businesses and doctors.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@maporsche,

maporsche wrote:

How can you say that a 10% difference isn't meaningful?

TORT reform was inacted and costs increased more slowly (at least compared to the rest of the nation). Maybe it has nothing to do with TORT reform, maybe it does.

I think TORT reform should be added into the Insurance Reform bill that congress is considering now. If for no other reason, then to make it's passage more likely. If you added the public option and let the Republicans add in TORT reform, you may have enough votes in the Senate to get the PO passed.

Cyclop said before that $50 billion is a drop in the bucket in national economics too.

The statistics are pretty consistent that malpractice insurance factors into about 2% of healthcare costs nationwide. As we pointed out before, that would be just under $50 billion if you figure that healthcare costs are 17% of the national economy.

But almost all of the more reputable sources I've looked at who have crunched the numbers agree that the raw statistics do not adequately factor in the costs of defensive medicine, etc., so I don't know if real numbers will be available anywhere.

The point I've been making, and also Ican, is reducing malpractice costs will not increase healthcare costs, and all logic tells you that there will be savings if it is no more than the doctor won't need to raise his fees to upgrade his equipment.

Neither Ican nor I or anybody else arguing for tort reform thinks it will solve the healthcare problems. But the straight costs today are not the only problem and Texas and others have proved that tort reform does result in greater access to doctors and insurers and I doubt anybody can show how increased cmpetition in anything has not been effective in increasing options for people and/or reducing costs..

It should be part of the debate.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

I give up with you CI. I don't have the time/desire(/ability?) to attempt to explain this to you.

0 Replies

AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know