Real Health Care Reform

Charles Krauthammer - A Better Plan for Health-Care Reform - washingtonpost.com: "Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant -- $20,000 for a family of four -- to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance)."

Krauthammer has a simple, two-point plan to reform health care:

1) Tort Reform
2) Real insurance reform, including ending the subsidization of employer-provided health care and giving the tax deduction/credit to the individual

I've advocated the same policies in prvious posts on this blog. Until such reforms are tried, the Left can't truly claim that the free market has been tried and found wanting.

Doctors Boo Obama's Obeisance To The Trial Lawyers

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Why He Was Booed: "HHS has further said that reasonable limits placed on noneconomic damages in malpractice cases would save $60 billion to $108 billion a year...'These savings would lower the cost of health insurance and permit an additional 2.4 million to 4.3 million Americans to obtain insurance,' the department said.

Nearly 10% of the cost of health care services, figures PricewaterhouseCoopers, is attributable to medical malpractice lawsuits. Roughly 2% is caused by direct costs of the lawsuits while an additional 5% to 9% is due to expenses run up by defensive medicine...PricewaterhouseCoopers also found that half of health care costs are due to wasteful spending and said that defensive medicine is the biggest producer of waste.

It would make sense to anyone who wants to bring down health care costs that caps on medical malpractice awards should be on the table — unless that person was beholden to the trial bar that is filled with members who make fortunes suing doctors."

Like the UAW, the trial lawyers are a Democrat sacred cow. And they are being paid off by this President with YOUR tax dollars.