Malpractice Debate Gets New Life

President Obama's health reform plan would pick up some Republican support if medical malpractice was put on the table.

That may sound ridiculous given Democrats' longtime opposition to the idea, but the suggestion was recently pushed by a member of their own party.

Historically, tort reform has been a nonstarter with Democrats, who get a lot of campaign money and political backing from the nation's trial lawyers. But at least one Democrat, former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, is suggesting that they let down their guard on this issue to get health reform passed.

"The bipartisan trade-off in a viable health care bill is obvious: Combine universal coverage with malpractice tort reform in health care," Bradley wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

Many Republicans support medical malpractice reform but they have not pushed hard for it this year. Still, the issue was raised recently by a key GOP lawmaker. Wyoming Republican Mike Enzi singled out a lack of malpractice reform as one of the reasons he opposes the health care bill making its way through the Senate.

Doctors are passionate about the issue, saying lawsuits drive up health care costs. Doctors in Pennsylvania admitted that they performed unnecessary tests and referred patients to other doctors as defensive measures to avoid lawsuits, according to a 2005 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A 2006 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that almost 40 percent of malpractice insurance claims didn't involve errors but were costly for doctors.

Medical malpractice claims and legal defense costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, or about 1 percent of all health care spending, the Wall Street Journal reports. Doctors say defensive medicine to protect against lawsuits costs the system even more money.

But at least one health care economist says tort reform wouldn't significantly reduce costs overall.

"The expenses related to medical malpractice per se are a tiny fraction of overall health care expenditures," says Paul Hughes-Cromwick, an economist and senior analyst at Altarum Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan.