Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The answer appears to be yes according to an NBER working paper by Galasso and Luo: We find that, on average, laws that limit the liability exposure of healthcare providers are associated with a significant reduction in medical device patenting and that the effect is predominantly driven by innovators located in the states passing the…
Many people support malpractice insurance caps. They believe that malpractice insurance award caps will reduce medical costs in two ways: i) by decreasing malpractice premiums and ii) by decreasing the amount of defensive medicine physicians practice to avoid lawsuits. An article by Shirley Svorny, however, argues that malpractice awards are bad medicine. Physicians who are…
Frivolous lawsuits may increase medical spending in two ways: i) they increase the cost for physicians to practice medicine by raising malpractice insurance premiums, and ii) they increase utilization of unnecessary services when physicians practice ‘defensive medicine’. Creating a ‘loser pays’ tort system may be the best way to stop frivolous lawsuits. Loser-pays in the U.S.…
Yes, Dr. Peter Schuck (Professor, Yale Law School): “…juries in different states make different decisions on the same drug–hardly a recipe for the uniformity and predictability to which manufacturers should be entitled. A jury’s flaws are inherent in its design. In contrast, the FDA’s flaws–and they are many–can at least be remedied by Congress, to…
Many doctors claim that the medical malpractice system is broken and needs to be fixed. Doctors have high malpractice insurance premiums and often practice defensive medicine to protect themselves against lawsuits. To help alleviate this problem, many politicians have asked for some sort of tort reform. Tort reform can be generally categorized into 4 types…