When we last heard from Ezra Klein, he was explaining that it’s hard to understand the constitution because it’s over a hundred years old. Now, Jen Rubin takes the juice boxer to school on the nature of the judicial branch.
[Update a while later]
Losing a battle but winning the war against ObamaCare:
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a statement stressing that Republicans had kept “their promise to seek repeal of the job-destroying health care law.” The House and Senate Republicans’ unanimity on ObamaCare repeal is an important message to the base and to independents who fret that politicians don’t keep campaign promises. Moreover, we now have a clear demarcation between the two parties on a central issue. If elections are about choices, voters will have a clear one in 2012. Republicans seem very happy about that. The Democrats? Not so much.
Well, they weren’t so unhappy as to not vote in lockstep with a political loser. People like Joe Manchin will have a tough reelection fight. That vote may have been suicidal, particularly after his campaign rhetoric.
we need a huge reform of Tort Law.
Totally agree, except it is a pointless argument with people like Gerrib. It doesn’t matter to him that nations with socialized medicine have set up systems that significantly reduce tort payouts. That such systems account for most of the “savings” that socialized medicine brings to the industry. Or that if those savings were realized by simply reforming tort law first, then the cost of preventive care would go down immediately afterwards.
The point for people like Gerrib is not about cutting costs for the poor and providing better care. It is about transferring power from the many to the few under the guise of a promise of future benefit and benevolence. Tort reform would reduce the power of the few and provide benefits immediately. Benevolence would probably be unchanged due to ever present percentage of people willing to harm others for personal gain. For those people, we still have criminal law even after tort reform.
So if we somehow completely eliminate the cost of malpractice, we get a one-time health care cost savings of a little over 2%?
So there’s potential for real savings, but it’s a fairly small part of the picture.
And probably better done at the state level
Well, first of all, Will, 2% is not small at all in the context of current debate. That’s $55 billion a year, or half a $trillion over 10 years, which is how Obamacare scores its savings. Not even the proponents of Obamacare think it will save have a trillion dollars over the 10 year window.
Secondly, 2% is, as I said, likely to be the smallest reasonable estimate of the cost of defensive medicine. I think there are excellent reasons to think it might be substantially larger, e.g. 5%, which gets us up to $100 billion a year. I do hope you think $100 billion a year is not a small amount to save on the nation’s healthcare bill. Just ask yourself, for example, where else we could put $100 billion a year in healthcare spending, if we didn’t have to dump it into lawyers’ pockets and pointless medical procedures. How about medical research? Longevity research? You could do a lot with $100 billion a year.
Third, do you doubt that the practise of defensive medicine is growing, as medicine has become more complex, procedures more daring, the science harder to understand? That means cutting off the oxygen to this process now means larger and larger savings as time goes by. Or rather, if we don’t do something about it now, we can look forward to that 2% growing steadily larger. For example, the costs of litigation and reparations now make up about 20% of the price of childhood vaccines, thanks to Rob Smith and friends. Want to see that spread to the cost of, say, heart disease treatment? (I would guess the costs of malpractice now make up at least 10% of the cost of normal childbirth, by the way.)
And probably better done at the state level
All of this, except for getting rid of pointless and stupid Federal meddling, like the ban on interstate insurance sales, and the bizarre Federal tax regime with respect to healthcare premiums, should indeed be done at the state level.
But that’s one more reason why PPACA is a stupid law. It does nothing to address the actual unnecessary costs of medical care, and instead increases the counter-productive Federal meddling that already makes it complex and expensive. It’s essentially the Federal equivalent in the health-care market of local rent control in a city housing market, and everyone knows how badly that turns out.