| 01/16/2005 |
| Damage caps won't solve insurance woes |
Americans see health care costs as a more pressing issue.
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His cure-all seems to be to limit the amount of jury awards victims of medical malpractice can receive for pain and suffering damages. But Americans, with good reason, believe the president's priorities are out of sync with their own. According to a recent poll by the independent Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans place capping jury awards at the bottom of their list of what ails our health care system. The public is more concerned about making health insurance more affordable to working Americans, making Medicare more financially sound and doing something about the growing number of people who have no health care coverage. The medical malpractice argument raged on last year in Pennsylvania's legislature, which entertained the idea of capping jury awards, and then again on the national stage during the heated presidential campaign. But there is little research to back up claims that capping jury awards will be the silver bullet that will lower malpractice insurance rates. According to official government figures, malpractice costs comprise only 2 percent of all health care spending. ● Not one insurance company has agreed to lower insurance rates if caps are instituted. In fact, the nation's largest medical malpractice insurance company, in a request to raise rates 19 percent in Texas after caps legislation was passed there, admitted that limiting jury awards would not lower insurance rates. ● Only a small percentage of malpractice cases actually make it to trial, and the vast majority of those are resolved favorably to the defendants. ● Limiting non-economic jury awards is an injustice to malpractice victims who are not wage-earners - like children and the elderly. While the president points the finger at trial lawyers, he continues to side with pharmaceutical companies on other issues that would reduce health care costs - allowing Americans to buy drugs from Canada and permitting Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Both have the overwhelming support of the American public. The skyrocketing cost of malpractice insurance is clearly a problem, especially here in Pennsylvania. But the argument must be viewed from all sides. Doctors must be willing to take genuine steps to reduce the alarming rate of malpractice injuries and deaths, and the largely unregulated insurance industry must be held more accountable.
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