They do things very differently elsewhere, reports the AMA’s American Medical News (via White Coat):
“Nobody is as hospitable to potential liability as we are in this country,” said Richard A. Epstein, director of the law and economics program at the University of Chicago Law School. “The unmistakable drift is we do much more liability than anybody else, and the evidence on improved care is vanishingly thin.”
In other news, the Obama administration is now rolling out its test project grants on med-mal; for reasons already aired in this space, Carter Wood isn’t expecting much.
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Holy burying the lede, Batman. After extolling the virtues of the limited liability medical systems in Canada, Sweden, and the UK, this line is THIRTY PARAGRAPHS DOWN the linked article:
How novel. Doctors in single-payer systems have state-sponsored liability protection (which is probably less inclined to simply deny claims) and therefore practice less “defensive medicine,” so the whole thing costs less to run. Who woulda thunk it?
I guess it’s too much to ask that the authors take a head count to see how many of the “tort reform” proponents in the US are also opposed to single-payer.
Well, they’re still technically paying through the nose for health care, then. They’re not paying the doctor directly, but they pay taxes to the government, who then pays out on medical malpractice suits.
Of course it’s easier to settle claims when you’re using someone else’s money that you extracted by applying the might of the state.
Don’t plaintiff’s lawyers like to claim that the American liability system – which includes the doctors’ assets being at risk – improves quality of care? If that’s true, the single payer/”doesn’t hit doctors in their pockets” system results in lower quality of care.
As for “the whole thing cost[ing] less,” we all know how that is achieved -and it would be intersting to compare the relative standards of care applied to medical negligence cases in the various systems.
I just operated on a Canadian patient to help improve a disability created by a botched procedure in Toronto. In the US, it would be a cut and dry medmal case. In Canada he was told that it was an accepted complication. (Aortic perforation during laporoscopic cholecystectomy).
Joe,
Costs comparisons for medical care in the UK and the USA are measured in terms of GDP devoted to total care whether from patient or government.
With a pure government system, medical need alone determines payment and so med-mal is not needed for the function of adverse outcome insurance. In a market system, private health insurance should not have to pay for care caused by error, and you get high cost determinations of fault. That system has more error in itself than it resolves.
tekel said “How novel. Doctors in single-payer systems have state-sponsored liability protection (which is probably less inclined to simply deny claims) and therefore practice less “defensive medicine,” so the whole thing costs less to run. Who woulda thunk it? ”
What is the basis for stating that state-sponsored liability protection is probably less inclined to simply deny claims? Would doctors be treated differently than patients? Medicare has a claim denial rate that is approximately double the average of private medical insurers.
Lacking this assumption, the rest of the argument fails.
You must remember that “government” in the Scandinavian countries at least is synonymous with “political” – so in my country at least, the so-called “no-fault compensation” scheme is completely corrupted. Payments to “victims” of “med-mal” run into millions, and the whole scheme has been characterized as Norway’s cheapest lotteries – the entrance ticket is free, the prizes are hefty and you have a 40 % chance of winning. The lawyers are still having a field day, as they now can feast on the government’s coffers instead of the individual doctor.