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Obama has a calculator that does that; he uses it for "Jobs Saved" - I'm sure it could do this for us, too.
It was mainly passed to bring consumer health care costs down.
Did it make that goal?
And it should be pretty easy to compare the the costs in Texas to the costs in other states that did not enact tort reform over the same period.
If you can't see that, you're an idiot.
So, how have health care cost increases in Texas compared to those in other states since Texas tort reform?
Obama has a calculator that does that; he uses it for "Jobs Saved" - I'm sure it could do this for us, too.
If tort reform does not have a noticeable effect on the cost to the consumer, perhaps its importance is overhyped.
I wouldn't say negligible, but maybe it has been exaggerated.
Sure. It has attracted more doctors to Texas. I hope it means rural Texans have more access to specialists now; that would be a real plus.Apparently, tort reform did help some in Texas. After-all, it was passed partially for the need to bring specialties back that have left. It apparently made that goal.
But tell me WC, have doctors passed on their cost savings to Texans yet?
How does the rate of increase of consumer health costs in PA compare to that of TX since tort reform was passed in 2003?
I have no way to answer that. If it only brought profits back to a reasonable level for a doctor, then I would say likely not. There would have to be enough extra profit for doctors to start to compete for business, before seeing market controlled pricing.
Any idea how much it reduced insurance for doctors? My point about it being the wrong type of tort reform is that it capped liability rather than defining what liability can be. Capping the payout I guess limits the chances a trial lawyer will take. Capped at $250k(?), and at 30% of the take, a lawyer has to win more cases than if he can take 30% of $5,000,000. Maybe they now only take cases with real cause rather than shooting the dice for a win or settlement.
According to the AMA op-ed I posted above, liability insurance for doctors in Texas went down 25%.
Last edited by Winehole23; 10-21-2009 at 03:52 PM.
Unfortunately, my company is not big enough for me to be able to identify a real trend; sorry - in group insurance, it is very hard to do an apples to apples comparison; because no two groups are alike.
I'll tell you this; tort reform didn't change the book rates for insurance carriers in Texas one bit; the trend didn't adjust as far as I could tell.
The docs might have saved some money; it wasn't passed along - it certainly was not a revelation of savings.
Thanks. I thought you may have had a line on some general statistics, but what you said is helpful all the same.
OH really. No "link" post now that it agrees with your viewpoint?
This is his business. I didn't get the exact answer I was looking for, but I am content to take his word for his personal experience in the course of his work.
I welcome any statistics from you regarding the effect of Texas tort reform on consumer health costs, and would appreciate a link to them as well.
If you merely want to make this about me again, that's your prerogative.
@SnC: I doubt 101A is talking out of his hat on this one. He's in the biz, a rock-ribbed conservative and a vocal opponent of Obamacare.
Well, at the higher specialty rates of about $250 k annual, that would be a 62.5k savings, then after federal tax, a $40,625 profit. That's about $20 per hour at best he can reduce his cost for a patient.
Now realistically, this helps physicians who are lawsuit targets. The insurance cost is likely not as large a reason as the time and associated income lost when a doctor has to be in court. Any real reduction in lawsuits is where the incentive is. I'll bet that doctors in lawyer targeted specialties left because they couldn't turn a profit when in the courtroom, or left for fear of that happening.
Yet more evidence that the importance of tort reform is overhyped.
I'm not questioning 101A. I'm just flabbergasted that Chump will take someone's personal statement and not ask for a link. And yes I wrote flabbergasted. It just happened.
Isn't this year a bad year to rate anything? With the change of policy, and all the talk of socializing our healthcare. It would be like judging new policies if they were enacted in 1929.Yet more evidence that the importance of tort reform is overhyped.
Yeah it did.
Do you find some posters to be more reliable/trustworthy than others, SnC?
Last edited by Winehole23; 10-21-2009 at 05:39 PM.
We've had medical malpractice tort reform in Texas since 2003.
But do you agree or disagree with a lawyer taking on bad cases when there is a chance he can get a settlement out of it? With a cap, those odds change for taking on cases with little or no merit. Isn't that a plus?Yet more evidence that the importance of tort reform is overhyped.
I never thought the cap would help because I believe in limiting what can be considered liable. If a doctor or hospital is actually guilty, I don't think there should be a cap. However, I'm beginning to believe the cap has more good than bad, just by reducing the payoff to the lawyer. makes sense to me he's not as willing to roll the dice on something he might not get paid for. only needed one multi-million dollar suit to win or settle in a year to be fat in ash. $30% of $250k requires allot more wins. cannot afford to waste time on loser cases any more.
'nuff said. It's best just to ignore Chump...
Concentrate on the Cylons.
And to the injured patient.
found the article...
When Sam Houston was still hanging his hat in Tennessee in the 1830s, it wasn't uncommon for fellow Tennesseans who were packing up and moving south and west to hang a sign on their cabins that read "GTT" – Gone to Texas.
Today obstetricians, surgeons and other doctors might consider reviving the practice. Over the past three years, some 7,000 M.D.s have flooded into Texas, many from Tennessee.
Why? Two words: Tort reform.
In 2003 and in 2005, Texas enacted a series of reforms to the state's civil justice system. They are stunning in their success. Texas Medical Liability Trust, one of the largest malpractice insurance companies in the state, has slashed its premiums by 35%, saving doctors some $217 million over four years. There is also a compe ive malpractice insurance industry in Texas, with over 30 companies competing for business. This is driving rates down.
The result is an influx of doctors so great that recently the State Board of Medical Examiners couldn't process all the new medical-license applications quickly enough. The board faced a backlog of 3,000 applications. To handle the extra workload, the legislature rushed through an emergency appropriation last year.
Now many of the newly arriving doctors are heading to rural or underserved parts of the state. Four new anesthesiologists have headed to Beaumont, for example. Meanwhile, San Antonio has experienced a 52% growth in the number of new doctors.
But if tort reform has been a boon – and it is likely one of the reasons the state's economy has thrived in recent years – it was not easy to enact.
In one particularly grueling fight in the legislature in 2003, an important piece of a reform bill went down to a narrow defeat in the state Senate after a single Republican switched his support to vote against it. Republican Gov. Rick Perry was so incensed that he bolted out of his office in the Capitol, sprinted into the Senate chamber, and vaulted a railing to come face to face with the defecting senator.
That confrontation fizzled, however, and before long Texas succeeded at enacting two simple but effective reforms. One capped medical malpractice awards for noneconomic damages at $250,000, changed the burden of proof for claiming injury for emergency room care from simple negligence to "willful and wanton neglect," and required that an independent medical expert file a report in support of the claimant.
This has allowed doctors and hospitals to cut costs and even increase the resources devoted to charity care. Take Christus Health, a nonprofit Catholic health system across the state. Thanks to tort reform, over the past four years Christus saved $100 million that it otherwise would have spent fending off bogus lawsuits or paying higher insurance premiums. Every dollar saved was reinvested in helping poor patients.
The second 2003 reform cleaned up much of the mess surrounding asbestos litigation by creating something called multidistrict litigation (MDL). This took every case in the state involving a common injury or complaint, like silicosis or asbestosis, and consolidated it for pretrial discovery in one court.
One judge now makes all pretrial discovery and evidence rulings, including the validity of expert doctor reports, for all cases. This creates legal consistency and virtually eliminates "venue shopping" – a process by which trial lawyers file briefs in districts that they know will be friendly to frivolous suits. Trials still occur in plaintiffs' home counties.
More change sailed through the legislature in 2005; tort reform had become popular with voters and lobbying against it was ineffectual. The 2005 reform created minimum medical standards to prove an injury in asbestos and silica cases. Now plaintiffs must show diminished lung capacity in addition to an X-ray indicating disease.
In sum, these reforms have worked wonders. There are about 85,000 asbestos plaintiffs in Texas. Under the old system, each would be advancing in the courts. But in the four years since the creation of MDLs, only 300 plaintiffs' cases have been certified ready for trial. And in each case the plaintiff is almost certainly sick with mesothelioma or cancer.
No one else claiming "asbestosis" has yet filed a pulmonology report showing diminished lung capacity. This means that only one-third of 1% of all those people who have filed suit claiming they were sick with asbestosis have actually had a qualified and impartial doctor agree that they have an asbestos-caused illness.
In the silica MDL, there are somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 plaintiff cases. In the four years since the cases were consolidated under the MDL, 47 plaintiffs have filed a motion to proceed to trial based on a medical report indicating diminished pulmonary capacity. Of those 47, the court has certified 29 people as having diminished lung capacity. This, too, is less than 1% of all the "silicosis" claims made in Texas. No one has proven the real cause of his illness to be silica, as no case yet has been certified for trial.
Before the asbestos and silica MDLs were created, nonmalignancy plaintiffs settled with defendants for anywhere between $30,000 to $150,000 per case. No one knows how many bogus cases were settled in the state with large cash payments. Lawyers who specialized in defending those cases say there were tens of thousands.
The full costs of large settlements and runaway malpractice suits may never be known. But it is clear that the costs were paid for by consumers through the increased price of goods, by pensioners through diminished stock prices, and by workers through lost jobs. Another group often overlooked is those who are priced out of health care, or who didn't receive charity care because doctors were squeezed by tort lawyers. Frivolous lawsuits hit the uninsured the hardest.
Texas recently became home to more Fortune 500 companies than New York and California. Things are trending well for the Lone Star State. Anecdotally, we can see that while doctors are moving in, trial lawyers are packing up and heading west. They're GTC -- Gone to California.
Mr. Nixon, a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121097874071799863.html
There's nothing there about lower costs for patients in Texas, SnC.
Doesn't any longer get the necessary money.
Remember, my idea of tort reform was to limit the reasons for litigation, not the amount of the payout. I am not advocating the method Texas took. I am only acknowledging that at some level, it appears to have better results than bad. But it does have bad results.
Well the free market idea is that the compe ion will create the better product and the higher supply of doctors will create a lower product. Like I said I think this years and last years rollercoaster ride of a market are distorting the results.
I looked and cannot find anything about lowering costs for the patients. However if Dr. are in abundance and they are getting a lower premium, then a way to bring in the business is to lower their price.
Last edited by spursncowboys; 10-21-2009 at 04:27 PM. Reason: Adding
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