A little more than 1%, perhaps, but not up the 20% you appear to have claimed in an earlier post. The authors in the Huffington Post article purportedly derive the $2,000 per year figure from a paper by Kessler and McClellan (1996), which they summarize:
Considerably lower than 20%. Your first link (American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons) claims that
, but they make no citations.
For what it’s worth, measurement of the extent to which tort reform may reduce costs remains somewhat controversial, Kessler and McClellan notwithstanding. The chapter on liability in the Handbook of Health Economics (2000) puts it this way:
A more recent study (Mello, Chandra, Gawande, and Studdert [2010]) finds that
It’s a lot, but not enough (IMO) to justify the incommensurate level of attention given to the issue of tort reform.
Yeah but the important thing is that it passed, who cares about the details.
I’ll probably be losing my health insurance provided by the company I work for at the end of the year because of those details.
Who needs due diligence when we have compassion coming out of our asses.
That’s okay though, as long as all of those poor folks without insurance are taken care of, I don’t mind hunting for a new plan which undoubtedly will cost me considerably more than the poor folks will pay because I make more you see.
Fair enough, Randroid. I saw other cites between 5% and 9% cost of defensive medicine (some derived from the Kessler-McClellan studies, some from elsewhere).
So let’s use 5%, the low end of that spectrum. US Health care costs in 2008, the last year I could find figures for, was over $2.3 Trillion, according to Kaiser. Surely that’s gone up since then. And as any reasonable person knows, it’s sure to rise even more given Obamacare’s lack of an appetite suppressant mechanism.
But using those very conservative numbers, I see the potential was there to avoid $115 billion in defensive spending. That’s a lot of money.
And this president, Mr Short Bus Campaigner and our Telepromptr-in-chief, didn’t do any of that because he didn’t want to offend his Trial Lawyer sugar daddies.
And that’s the guy most of this board will be voting for.
To be perfectly straight about it I feel that even 5% is perhaps rather higher than the data suggests. And note further that such extrapolations don’t account for general equilibrium effects — in the final accounting, lowering costs from defensive medicine could plausibly raise medical expenditures along other vectors. (Health care is at least somewhat price sensitive.) Even taking at face value a possible across-the-board 5% reduction in health care expenditures, however, (1) the savings are comparatively small and (2) political reality may make them quite difficult to achieve.
In the grand scheme of things tort reform simply isn’t that big a problem, and achieving it won’t fix the health care system.
Okay. I have attempted to bring facts to this discussion; if you would like me — and possibly other disinterested parties — to continue doing so, then I would suggest a tonal shift. I do not care to spend time parsing content out of partisan swipes.
Example: Sen. James Inhofe, R-OK: “I don’t have to read it, or know what’s in it. I’m going to oppose it anyways”.
Which, of course, to the likes of Magiver, is the DemoncRat Party’s fault.
Now, where’s that “Repeal and replace” stuff the GOP promised in the last election? There was a token, even condescending, attempt at repeal, but there’s been no action at all to pass or even define a health care bill that the GOP can pass and stand behind to the public. Nothing at all, and it would have been foolish to expect any, of course.