WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl (Ariz.) today made the following remarks on the Senate floor regarding medical liability reform:
“A goal shared by all of us in the Senate is making healthcare more affordable for Americans.
“So why hasn’t there been more bipartisan support for medical liability reform, a popular, cost-free measure that would unquestionably yield significant savings for patients and doctors?
“The most honest answer to this question came from former Vermont governor and national Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, who said at an August town hall meeting in Virginia, that medical liability reform has not been included in any of the Democrats’ bills because they don’t want to take on the trial lawyers.
“Protecting trial lawyers should not be a goal of healthcare reform. Their multi-million dollar ‘jackpot justice’ lawsuits drive up the cost of healthcare for everyone and are a big reason Americans’ healthcare premiums have soared.
“Why?
“To help guard themselves from ruinous lawsuits, physicians must purchase expensive medical liability insurance – often at a cost of $200,000 or more for some specialists, such as obstetricians and anesthesiologists.
“Because doctors pay for this insurance, patients do, too. Hudson Institute economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth estimates that 10 cents of every dollar paid for healthcare goes toward the cost of doctors’ medical liability insurance.
“Dr. Stuart Weinstein, the former president of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, has written about the extra cost of delivering a baby because of the high costs of these premiums. If a doctor delivers 100 babies a year and pays $200,000 for medical liability insurance, ‘$2,000 of the delivery cost for each baby goes to pay the cost of the medical liability premium,’ Dr. Weinstein wrote. So the costs of this insurance, passed on to patients, are real.
“An even bigger cost related to the threat of lawsuits is doctors’ use of defensive medicine. The looming specter of lawsuits makes most doctors feel that they have no choice but to take extra, or defensive, precaution when treating patients.
“A 2005 survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 92 percent of doctors said they had made unnecessary referrals or ordered unnecessary tests and procedures solely to shield themselves from medical liability litigation.
“To say the costs of defensive medicine are high is an understatement. Sally Pipes, president of the Pacific Research Institute, has found that defensive medicine costs $214 billion per year. A new study by PricewaterhouseCoopers reveals similar findings, pegging the annual cost at $239 billion.
“Medical liability reform works to bring down healthcare costs for patients and doctors. Among the ways to do it are capping non-economic damage awards and attorneys’ fees and implementation of stricter criteria for expert witnesses testifying in medical liability lawsuits. Trial lawyers frequently use their own ‘experts’ to criticize the defendant doctor’s practice. The experts should have no relationship with, or, financial gain from, the plaintiff’s lawyer and should have real expertise in the area of medicine at issue.
“Some states, including my home state of Arizona, have already implemented medical liability reform measures with positive results.
“Dr. James Carland, president and CEO of MICA, Arizona’s largest medical liability insurer, wrote a letter to me to describe some of the results he’s seen from medical liability laws implemented in Arizona – specifically from two statutes: one that reformed expert witness standards and another that imposed a requirement to inform the defendant, before trial, of expert witness testimony and preview the substance of that testimony.
“Dr. Carland wrote that the enactment of these two statutes has ‘reduced meritless [medical malpractice] suits’ in Arizona.
“Indeed, after their enactment, medical liability suits dropped by about 30 percent. That drop has been accompanied by a drop in medical liability premiums. Since 2006, MICA has reduced premiums and returned $90 million to its members in the form of policyholder dividends.
“Another state that’s had success with medical liability reform is Texas, which passed a series of measures in 2003, including limits on non-economic damages and a higher burden-of-proof requirement for emergency room negligence. The number of doctors practicing in Texas has skyrocketed, while costs have plummeted.
“It’s been widely reported that since those reforms were implemented, medical licenses in Texas have increased 18 percent, with 7,000 new doctors moving to the state.
“To reduce costs for both physicians and patients, Senator Cornyn and I have introduced legislation that would achieve medical liability reform by combining what has worked best in Texas and Arizona. We have taken the Texas stacked cap model for non-economic damages and coupled it with expert witness statutes proven to limit the filing of meritless lawsuits. “Republicans offered liability amendments during the Finance Committee mark up, but all of them were ruled out of order by the chairman. One of these amendments, recently scored by the Congressional Budget Office, would have saved the federal government $54 billion in healthcare costs over the next 10 years.
“Medical liability reform enjoys heavy support among our bosses, the American people. According to a new Manhattan Institute paper , 83 percent of Americans want to see it in any healthcare bill passed by Congress.
“Despite this support and the concrete evidence that it would lower healthcare costs for doctors, patients, and the government, none of the healthcare bills being written by Congressional Democrats tackle medical liability reform.
“It makes no sense that in debates about bringing down costs, this commonsense measure is ignored by the majority.
“If we’re serious about making healthcare more affordable, we must have medical liability reform. We all work for the American people, not the trial lawyers.”
