Related posts

• November 30 roundup (15)
• Medical tourism (12)
• Massachusetts: “Innovative Medical Liability Reform” (5)
• Does tort reform affect insurance rates? (2)
• White Coat’s lawsuit story, cont’d (0)

Related posts

• When a judge sues for defamation, cont’d (0)
• Watch what you say about lawyers, cont’d (7)
• Watch what you say about lawyers dept.: Amiel Cueto (0)
• Vioxx settlement: February 8 update (32)
• Vioxx roundup, January 15-17 (1)

Related posts

• Obama transition on health care costs (7)
• Yes, tea is hot, too. (Redux: Villona Maryash edition) (0)
• Update: New York bill banning short-term rentals (0)
• Update: Indian sovereignty advances (0)
• Update: court dismisses Kremen v. Morelli (0)

Marc Rodwin and colleagues’ highly publicized conclusion that Massachusetts does not have a malpractice insurance crisis (May/Jun 08) is not supported by the data in their paper.

First, the sole finding supporting the conclusion, that malpractice insurance rates declined 1 percent from 1990 to 2005, is an artifact of the Simpson Paradox. Rates for low-risk doctors increased 14 percent; rates for high-risk doctors increased 45 percent. The mean decreased entirely because the mix of doctors changed, and the percentage of insured doctors with expensive high-risk policies declined substantially…

Related posts

• Marc Rodwin and the Massachusetts medical malpractice crisis (5)
• May 19 roundup (2)
• Your Prisoner Sex Change Update (17)
• Who’s riding that snowplow? (3)
• Welcome National Review Online readers (0)

Guess for yourself, and then go see whether ER Stories’ answer is higher or lower than you guessed (Dec. 7).

Related posts

• Obama transition on health care costs (7)
• National Law Journal on medical malpractice bills (0)
• Medical tourism (12)
• Med-mal at Point of Law (0)
• Marc Rodwin and the Massachusetts medical malpractice crisis (5)

Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpractice insurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.

Yes, because suppressing current malpractice insurance rates by adopting artificially rosy premises as to future payouts worked out so well when tried in New York. Update Monday: transition yanks entire “Agenda”, this section and others.

Related posts

• October 12 roundup (4)
• May 2 roundup (3)
• June 20 roundup (1)
• January 21 roundup (0)
• Because liability reform would be too hard (1)

Related posts

• Health Affairs letter on Marc Rodwin Massachusetts Medical Malpractice Study (0)
• The next wave of defensive medicine (8)
• Ted’s mythbusting at Point of Law (0)
• Prosecuting the innocent, without consequences (0)
• Privacy law and criminal investigations, cont’d (0)

At Bumrungrad Hospital, [spokesman Ruben] Toral said, the lower cost of living is a major factor in the savings, but so are differences in how the medical system operates.

Doctors in Thailand pay about $5,000 a year for malpractice insurance, compared with more than $100,000 for some specialties in the United States.

Thai courts will adjudicate malpractice claims, but the largest award ever issued was about $100,000 and the law there doesn’t permit damages for pain and suffering.

(Mark Roth, “Surgery abroad an option for those with minimal health coverage,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sep. 10). Apparently the Thais haven’t heard the propaganda from the American trial bar that caps on non-economic damages don’t lower malpractice insurance premiums or medical expenses. And apparently, thousands of Americans prefer cheaper healthcare to the opportunity to recover pain-and-suffering damages: unfortunately, plaintiffs’ organizations fight very hard to ensure that American consumers don’t actually get that choice. (Via, of all places, Bizarro-Overlawyered, where one can almost see the smoke coming out of the ears of the posting blogger because of the “Does-Not-Compute” cognitive dissonance.)

Update: Justinian Lane continues his blog’s consistent dishonesty. My post makes two points:

1) Thailand has lower medical malpractice insurance costs in part because there are caps of zero on non-economic damages in that country, notwithstanding the repeatedly refuted claims of the plaintiffs’ bar that insurance costs and caps are unrelated.

2) Americans, when given a choice, prefer cheaper health-care to the opportunity for pain-and-suffering damages, but the plaintiffs’ bar fights the opportunity to give consumers so much as the choice; in this debate, as with most debates over liability reform, it’s the reformers who are the true consumer advocates.

In response, Lane has a lengthy diatribe pointing out that Thailand has lower expenses for many other things, which is pointed out in this very post at the beginning of the block quote! Lane then proceeds to attack me for a claim I never made, while ignoring the claims I did make. Readers can judge for themselves why Lane and Dugger’s blog only debates against strawmen, rather than what reformers actually say.

Lane’s post does have an interesting statistic: there are 600 doctors who see 800,000 patients a year at the Bumrungrad hospital. Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope calculations: if the average doctor there saves $50,000 to $100,000/year in malpractice insurance costs, that’s $30 million to $60 million a year saved by the hospital. If the average Thai family has three to five visits to a hospital clinic doctor a year, that’s an average savings of $120-$400/year per family. How many American households would turn down $120-$400 a year because they’d rather have the opportunity for lottery-ticket non-economic damages in a malpractice case? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m willing to find out by giving American consumers the option. The fact that the plaintiffs’ bar fights very hard against giving consumers the option shows that they know that the public isn’t getting their money’s worth from the civil justice system, perhaps because over half the money spent on insurance for our woefully inefficient and inaccurate game-show of a medical malpractice litigation system goes to lawyers, rather than patients.

Related posts

• Does tort reform affect insurance rates? (2)
• Update: Lawrence Poliner v. Texas Health Systems appeal (5)
• “Why Doctors Are Heading for Texas” (17)
• “Running Doctors Out Of The Emergency Room” (5)
• Why object to HIPAA? (0)

Sen. Ensign’s S. 22 itself is finally available on THOMAS.

(cross-posted at Point of Law)

Related posts

• Medical tourism (12)
• Marc Rodwin and the Massachusetts medical malpractice crisis (5)
• Does tort reform affect insurance rates? (2)
• Wrongful birth reaches Germany (11)
• Wrongful birth (cont’d) (4)

We look forward to Kevin Drum giving this paper the same deference he credulously gave AIR’s last bogus report.

One flaw of the paper is that we didn’t include the story of “Bob,” the dummy literally used to scapegoat insurance-company executives by CJD at an ATLA conference. For other CJD shenanigans, see Dec. 23, 2004 and Mar. 19, 2004. (Cross-posted at Point of Law.)

Related posts

• Zombie Litigation (1)
• The trouble with civil Gideon (1)
• The Roberts Court and Liability Reform (0)
• The Patent Reform Act of 2007 (0)
• The Class Action Fairness Act Two Years Later (0)