It's testament to how odd our health care system is that it's a major story when Medicare (or any large insurer) decides to stop paying for mistakes. This does get to a broader point about medical malpractice, though, which is that the real crisis in malpractice isn't in court rooms, it's on operating tables. There's very little evidence suggesting that patients sue too easily. There's a lot of evidence suggesting that they sue fairly rarely given our incredibly high rate of medical errors. Given that, Republican attempts to "address" the crisis by limiting patient suits are rather backwards. They're simply an income enrichment program for doctors, not an effort to actually address the agonizing errors that lead to awful court battles and that, according to the Institute of Medicine, kill 100,000 Americans a year. Which is not to say reform isn't needed. It is. But it needs to be focused on patients, on disclosure, on mediation, and, most of all, on reducing the number of errors. One way to do that is to stop paying for mistakes. So good for Medicare. For those looking for more on the topic, I outlined a couple of other approaches in my old article, the Medical Malpractice Myth. Trivia: I'd forgotten about this, but the malpractice piece links to a May 2006 New England Journal of Medicine article coauthored by Clinton and Obama that tried to set forth a new way of dealing with malpractice claims. I'm not sure that Clinton and Obama ever shared a byline on anything else, so you can expect that piece to show up in pub trivia games in a few years. Or, you know. Maybe not.
