Word: carefully
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...This final bill will have three major objectives: providing near-universal coverage, improving the quality of health-insurance policies, and controlling the cost of health care (often wonkishly referred to as “bending the cost curve”). Although the legislation is likely to accomplish the first two goals, stemming health-care inflation will prove more elusive...
...ESPN anchor Dan Patrick’s catchphrase, “You can’t stop ’em, you can only hope to contain ’em,” could easily describe health-care costs. This year, national health spending will account for over 17 percent of GDP, outpacing all other countries. It has grown twice as fast as GDP since 1975 and shows no signs of letting up. Reversing this unsustainable trend is critical to any health-care plan, since maintaining universal coverage and insurance reform requires lowering costs in the long...
...public option stimulates competition by bargaining down prices, forcing private insurers to follow suit for fear of losing business. This should result in lower insurance costs for policyholders. Unfortunately, key congressional Democrats are backtracking on the public option; proposed alternatives, such as member-owned health-care cooperatives, will lack the market share necessary to challenge private insurers...
...proposed action on this front (the creation of a committee to make recommendations to Congress) is a cop-out. This is not surprising, given trial lawyers’ support for the Democratic Party. Malpractice lawsuits, while a necessary recourse for victims of medical errors, impose a cost on health-care providers. Fearing lawsuits, doctors buy expensive malpractice insurance and order unnecessary tests. Juries, lacking medical expertise, are generally poor assessors of guilt: A study in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that almost 25 percent of cases in which there was no identifiable medical error resulted in damages. Doctors...
...Instead, special health courts with expert judges should hear medical malpractice cases, a model similar to tax or bankruptcy courts. This would preserve plaintiffs’ legal right to sue while limiting unwarranted damages, reducing the cost of medical care. In a recent New York Times op-ed, former Senator Bill Bradley proposed a bipartisan compromise in which Republicans accept a public option in return for tort reform. Although political considerations probably make such a deal impossible, Congress should reconsider Bradley’s proposal...