The Washington Post told readers that: "congressional budget analysts said Friday that lawmakers could save as much as $54 billion over the next decade by imposing an array of new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits -- 10 times more than previously estimated."
The Los Angeles Times headlined a piece on the same report:"medical malpractice reform savings would be small, report says."
The report found that limiting malpractice suits would reduce annual spending on health care about 0.5 percent the equivalent of reducing spending on prescription drugs by 3 percent. The United States pays almost twice as much for prescription drugs as other healthy countries. At no point in the health care debate has the Washington Post had an article on the potential for reducing health care costs and government spending by reducing expenditures on prescription drugs.
(The Post never identified the earlier study that it suggests implied that malpractice reform had no effect [0.05 percent of health care spending] on spending.)
Thanks to Shelley Powers and Joel Norvell for the tip.
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