NORMA-JEAN LAURENT: Senator Kerry, you’ve stated your concern for the rising cost of health care, yet you chose a vice presidential candidate who has made millions of dollars successfully suing medical professionals. How do you reconcile this with the voters?

KERRY: Very easily. John Edwards is the author of the Patients’ Bill of Rights. He wanted to give people rights. John Edwards and I support tort reform. We both believe that, as lawyers — I’m a lawyer, too. And I believe that we will be able to get a fix that has eluded everybody else because we know how to do it.

KERRY: It’s in my health-care proposal. Go to johnkerry.com. You can pull it off of the Internet. And you’ll find a tort reform plan.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, important to understand, the president and his friends try to make a big deal out of it. Is it a problem? Yes, it’s a problem. Do we need to fix it, particularly for OGBYNs [sic] and for brain surgeons and others? Yes.

But it’s less than 1 percent of the total cost of health care. […]

CHARLES GIBSON: Mr. President, a minute and a half.

BUSH: Let me see where to start here. […]

BUSH: And what are his health programs? First, he says he’s for medical liability reform, particularly for OB/GYNs. There’s a bill on the floor of the United States Senate that he could have showed up and voted for if he’s so much for it.

Secondly, he says that medical liability costs only cause a 1 percent increase. That shows a lack of understanding. Doctors practice defensive medicine because of all the frivolous lawsuits that cost our government $28 billion a year. […]

GIBSON: Senator Kerry, we got several questions along this line, and I’m just curious if you’d go further on what you talked about with tort reform. Would you be favoring capping awards on pain and suffering? Would you limit attorney’s fees?

KERRY: A follow-up…

GIBSON: Yes. A follow-up on this for…

KERRY: Yes, I think we should look at the punitive and we should have some limitations.

But look, what’s really important, Charlie, is the president is just trying to scare everybody here with throwing labels around. […]

GIBSON: […] Thirty seconds, President Bush.

BUSH: You’re right, what does matter is a plan. He said he’s for — you’re now for capping punitive damages?

BUSH: That’s odd. You should have shown up on the floor in the Senate and voted for it then.

Medical liability issues are a problem, a significant problem. He’s been in the United States Senate for 20 years and he hasn’t addressed it.

We passed it out of the House of Representatives. Guess where it’s stuck? It’s stuck in the Senate, because the trial lawyers won’t act on it. And he put a trial lawyer on the ticket.

As the Washington Post notes, “Kerry glossed over his opposition to” medical malpractice caps. Unfortunately, the Post’s “Debate Referee” adjudicated that Bush exaggerated the effect of caps–and then proceeds to make the same mistake Bush criticized Kerry for, by omitting the effect of caps on defensive medicine costs by taking a statement in a CBO report out of context. As I noted on Point of Law,

What the CBO says is that, assuming medical malpractice expenses are 2%, reducing those expenses 25% will, as a matter of simple arithmetic, reduce total health care expenses by 0.5%. But, as Dr. Chusid acknowledges, that 2% assumption for medical malpractice expense is a great underestimate. There’s more than just insurance premiums: there’s the billions spent on inefficient defensive medicine, on hospital in-house lawyers, on time doctors spend with lawyers instead of with patients, on time doctors spend papering the record to protect themselves in event of suit, and on self-insurance–many hospitals don’t use a middleman insurance company. And for a number of disciplines, the malpractice insurance rate is unquestionably higher than 2%–the average OB/GYN pays a quarter of her net income in premiums.

The Post didn’t referee–they took sides in a controversial public policy debate, and did so on inaccurate information.

Mickey Kaus calls Kerry’s “I’m a lawyer too” the “worst-polling line of the night.”

Filed under: hospitals, John Edwards, politics