FED says Obamacare slowing hiring, sales.

[Row6]

Originally Posted by mastoidbone

not a game changer?
i guess 100-200 billion a YEAR is not a game changer----and i get it----you think 1 trillion deficits are no big deal---just steal it from the kids----i get it.

To most of us---saving 100-200 billion a year at cost of offending trial lawyers is a game changer.

Yeah and besides for not caring about my kids paying for our debt, they're Jewish and I'm an anti-semite. I'm a really bad guy!

Links to studies at the article:

" 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):



Texas is blue, the nation is red, and the law went into place at the dotted line. 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."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...0DHH_blog.html