Yesterday, Politico reported that 16 freshman Republicans had turned down their federal health-care benefits and were struggling on the individual market. NPR's Robert Siegel spoke with one of them, Rep. Rich Nugent from Florida, who argued that it would be wrong to ask Americans to cut back in these difficult fiscal times without doing so himself.
Then, he said that if we had real health-care reform -- i.e., tort reform -- then his premiums wouldn't be near $1,300 a month as they are now. This is a favorite thing for Republicans to harp on, and it sways many people because they likely know a doctor who pays high medical malpractice premiums, and because they've heard of some crazy-sounding lawsuit in which the plaintiff was awarded millions of dollars. Nugent says that this system encourages doctors to perform needless procedures to, essentially, cover their asses.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Medical malpractice suits aren't the cause of our expensive system. A bigger problem is, of course, that there are other reasons for doctors to perform needless, or at least, questionably needless, procedures; namely, that they get paid for doing so. We have an insurance system that pays per procedure; this creates a perverse situation in which a patient who gets sick in the hospital because of an infection spread by a doctor would actually generate more money for the hospital he or she is staying in.
This is also a big argument against forcing people to pay. As was also reported by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, doing things like raising co-pays or co-insurance actually creates a disincentive to getting care early. And if you think about it, this is why the insurance system was invented in the first place: People aren't very good judges when it comes to judging when to pay now to avoid a health-care problem later.
I'm not sure why people have never really gotten this.
