hi wavydog,
not meaning to offend you.
i shall read cs lewis whom i like reading and whose god, if i remember, is like a great cataract beside him. i would be curious to see what he says about dogma.
but if you take your wisdom from ole man limbaugh, i am sorry to hear it.
do you not know ezra klein?
even if he is talking maddow style, he's a very fine economic journalist.
he happened to cover your points almost exactly. i didn't know that those points you made were the ones made by boehner's lot in 2009.
except, of course, for your witch doctor.
i'm still looking out for your tort reform cost justification. but maybe it's just a message from republican central, which appears to have no real plan to cure healthcare and uses things like tort reform to disguise the fact it wishes to do nothing but keep the status quo.
And the status quo produces a surplus rate of cost growth, exclusivity and poor outcomes (see previous posts).
The trouble with Republican positions which I have discovered by trying to research them, is that they seem only rarely to be supported by facts.
And what worries me in this case is that you can tell me about a position based upon what a right wing person would wish to be true. But you seem uncertain of any actual evidence which supports it.
And then you seem reluctant to address the legion of facts that tend to point in a different direction.
Do you prefer to inhabit the realm of theory distributed by the party or the radio? Or are you curious about what is actually occurring here at a granular level? - so you can build your own theory out of those pesky things called data.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/meme-busting-tort-reform--cost-control/2011/06/02/AGpb0DHH_blog.html
"Let’s start with some basics. How much does the malpractice system really cost in the U.S.? The most recent, comprehensive estimate, which was published in Health Affairs in December, estimated that medical liability system costs were about $55.6 billion in 2008 dollars, or about 2.4 percent of all U.S. health-care spending. Some of that was indemnity payments, and some of it was the cost of components like lawyers, judges, etc.; most of this, however, or about $47 billion, was defensive medicine. So yes, that is real money, and it theoretically could be reduced.
The question is, will tort reform do that?
That’s actually an answerable question. You could look at areas where tort reform has already happened and see how things have changed. For instance, we could look at Texas, where non-economic damages on malpractice lawsuits were capped at $250,000 about eight years ago. You might remember when Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich said:
"Texas, for example, has adopted approaches to controlling health-care costs while improving choice, advancing quality of care and expanding coverage. Consider the successful 2003 tort reform."
So what happened to costs of care after that law was put in place? Public Citizen analyzed just that (pdf) using data from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care (Selected Medicare Reimbursement Measures) ...
If anything, Texas’s Medicare spending seems to have gone up faster than the nation’s since 2003. Hardly a persuasive argument for tort reform = cost control.
Another thing you could do is compare areas with high and low malpractice premiums, and see whether doctors practice differently. Guess what? Someone did. In the same issue of Health Affairs, another study showed that tort reform, which might lead to a 10 percent reduction in malpractice premiums (not small), which might translate into a health-care spending reduction of 0.1 percent."
Okay - so tort reform may be a good idea. But let's set aside the expectation it will make much of a difference to the total cost of healthcare. It's a sideshow.
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