As a sidebar to the conversation on med mal, Ezra also asks the important question, "why is Bill Clinton parroting right-waing talking points"? It's an interesting puzzle.
My best guess is that Clinton's been hanging out a fair bit with Bob Rubin, who is a big fan of tort reform (of course, he's also a big fan of greater social spending and poverty reduction, so the two sort of balance each other out. That, and he was The Man in the Clinton White House). And as political advice, he does have a point. It's much easier to agree with the public that malpractice costs are a problem than it is to try and convince them that they're not. And there are plenty of ways to address malpractice suits without capping payouts at a tiny sum; the John Edwards "three strikes and you're out" proposal, Clinton's "national standards" that would raise the presumption of innocence, and creating pre-trial hearings would all do something about the problem. Given that Democrats seem compelled to do business in the Reality-Based community, and we have a finite amount of time and money to expend tearing down right-wing fabrications, saying "yeah, we should do a little something about malpractice" might be a path of lower resistance than a full-bore PR campaign against the insurance industry.
