Tort-Deformity

In an ever increasingly tense atmosphere of health-care reform, the subject of tort reform has found a cozy spot in the heart’s of angry conservatives. In an effort to cut cost of health-care, fiscal caps would be imposed on malpractice law-suits and hinder the ability to collect on wrongful death, pain, and suffering in tort cases related to medical care.

Why not, right? As long as costs are down then the public is better-off, and in that spirit there are a few more actions the public should take. We should implement sweeping pay cuts for all of America’s teachers in order to improve the education system. To eliminate costs in crime-fighting, we will lower the salaries of all patrol-men, detectives, and highway patrol in order to develop and enhance the way we fight crime. And finally, we will immediately stop building stoplights and halt funding of highway improvement projects to make our roads and highways safer.

Yeah, doesn’t make much sense, does it? Funny thing about costs; some of them are definitely worth it. Just like roadways, crime, and education; health-care benefits from responsible spending on oversight (tort law, police, teachers, stop lights all oversee and help regulate their system)are worth the cost. Particularly in torts, which help insure people’s safety by holding people accountable for mistakes or breaches of the standard of care and help correct shattered lives from those actions. Tort law helps victims of negligence or worse, tort reform benefits corporations who can legally shrug their mission of insuring people’s lives. Which side do we want to be on? This change in the tort system seems to be more worried with helping HMO’s manage their costs than it does helping the average Joe. Seems….well…kinda evil.

If health-care wants to reduce costs responsibly—whilst helping doctors, patients, and victims of medical malpractice or abuse—then HMO regulation is the way to go. Making it harder for HMO’s to raise doctor’s premiums for insurance and harder for HMO’s to deny promised coverage to patients, then tort reform will look less like an destruction of victims rights and malpractice law—like it does in states like Texas where wrongful death and malpractice is non-existent now—and more like a plausible solution for everyone.

Studies agree that tort reform correlates with higher mortality rates. Not really helping health care then, is it? No, just helping cut costs.