Wednesday, November 17, 2004

MedMedia: O'Reilly the tort reform genius

MMFA shows us everybody's favorite discerning 'independent,' Bill O'Lielly, demonstrating his brilliant knowledge of how to lower malpractice premiums.

From the November 11 edition of The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: Don't you think tort reform would take care of that? ... If you lowered the medical malpractice, all -- everything would come on down.

From the November 4 edition of The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: But the only way that works is if you get the medical malpractice lawyers under control. ... That's No. 1. You can't get health care costs under control unless you stop the chaos in the court system. You can't!

Yes, Bill. It's all that simple. Even though MMFA goes on to properly debunk this myth.

I'm not absolutely against tort reform on principle, and while I'm sure that defensive medicine is a ridiculous cost to our health care system, I'm not so sure that it makes up the large percentage of expenditures some would like us to believe.

But of course, WindBag opens his mouth, and out comes this garbage, and those who choose not to exercise their God-given ability to research on the internet believe him. Since an entirely screwed up health insurance industry has nothing to do with the problems of the American health care system and all. Oh no. It has to be the lawyers' faults. Bad lawyer. Bad! Bad!

1 comment:

Garrett said...

I'm not arguing that personal injury lawyers aren't assholes. 98.93% of them are, and the other 1.07% are retired. But that doesn't mean that I am convinced that caps on monetary awards are as big a chunk of the problem of malpractice insurance as premiums some would have us believe.

Obviously the jury is still out on this. Study alpha says it'll reduce them by blah blah blah, Study delta says it won't do anything blah blah blah.

Texas instituted some caps, and insurance premiums went down. Some other states have instituted some caps, and nothing happened at all.

I think enough research gone into looking at insurance company investment practices to show that the problem is a complex one, and gunning after the one aspect of the problem that is clearly anti-patient instead of anti-insurance company seems to me to be the sort of corporate ass-licking that makes our government suck.

Mikey, you take rational self-interest to some sort of new height every day you get out of bed :)