Tell City attorney, Jeff Hagedorn, has a good column in the Perry County News rebutting a claim by one of the local doctors there that medical malpractice costs are a significant reason for climbing health care costs. Malpractice costs have dropped significantly since 2000. Malpractice premiums have even gone down to a lesser extent. Meanwhile health care costs have continued to shoot steeply upward. So, trying to peg health care costs to malpractice costs seems to be little more than wishful scapegoating.
The study found “that premiums and claims for doctors both have dropped significantly in recent years while the medical malpractice insurance industry is enjoying remarkable profits in light of the global economic collapse.
It concludes that further limiting the liability of negligent doctors and unsafe hospitals is not only unjustified, but also would have almost no impact lowering this country’s overall health-care expenditures.”
Hunter said, “thirty years of inflation-adjusted data show that medical malpractice premiums are the lowest they have been in this entire period. This is in no small part due to the fact that claims have fallen like a rock, down 45 percent since 2000. The periodic premium spikes we see in the data are not related to claims but to the economic cycle of insurers and to drops in investment income.
Since prices have not declined as much as claims have, medical malpractice insurer profits are higher than the rest of the property casualty industry, which has been remarkably profitable over the last five years.”
Thanks for this. I had just heard about this when I gave a speech last week.
Getting ready to do more work on health care, I also just found an interesting article on Singapore’s health care system. They apparently spend 1/5th as much as us per-capita (and thus, much less than many of the praised, heavier-govt systems) and have higher life expectancies than us.