Healthcare reform without legal reform would be difficult to take seriously, considering the many issues that need clarification and the costs that malpractice lawsuits add to healthcare spending. A new poll shows that a large majority of Americans want healthcare reform to address the malpractice system, so this should be a no-brainer for President Obama.
But in the President’s yawner of an address to Congress this week, he only acknowledged that malpractice lawsuits may increase healthcare costs. There was no call to improve this system like there were several endorsements of insurance regulation.
Kim Strassel noticed this as well, and she called out the President’s evasion of the issue. She was correct to note, however, that even if the President did ask for malpractice reform, the liberal Congress isn’t going to include it in the bill anyway:
It says everything that Mr. Obama wouldn’t plump for reform as part of legislation. The president knows the Senate would never have passed it in any event. Yet even proposing it was too much for the White House’s legal lobby. Mr. Obama is instead directing his secretary of health and human services to move forward on test projects. That would be Kathleen Sebelius, who spent eight years as the head of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association.
Anyone hoping for meaningful tort reform that would reduce or eliminate “defensive medicine” (which is only part of the legal reform needed in healthcare) is dreaming. This Congress will not allow it. The plaintiffs’ lawyers contribute too much to Democrats and represent an important part of the liberal ideology that is hostile to business.
Because President Obama and the Democrat Congress will not seriously attempt to reform an important area that both sides recognize raises healthcare costs, we can see what their true priorities are.
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