Uechi-Ryu.com

Came across this today:
http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=4968&sequence=0

Which contains the following:

Malpractice costs amounted to an estimated $24 billion in 2002, but that figure represents less than 2 percent of overall health care spending.(12) Thus, even a reduction of 25 percent to 30 percent in malpractice costs would lower health care costs by only about 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent, and the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small.

Looks like high healthcare costs aren't significantly impacted by lawsuits, as I'd come to believe from reading other threads here.

Depends. 1 billion is a lot to me. 24 billion is about 24 times a lot to me. May be a small fraction, but I wouldn't call it negligible. It's also a matter of distribution. If malpractice costs some doctors 300k+ a year, they're going to leave, and then people's only OB care will be through the ER. And that has costs of its own.

Oh, and its especially irritating if a cost is going to waste rather than to productivity.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Health care costs are way way up so obviously, a stagnent or declining rate of malpractice suits will calculate out to a small percentage.

The fact is heathcare costs are rising so much because of lawsuits. Doctor's perfrom every test imaginable whether it's needed or not to cover themselves should the patient develop something that a lawyer would argue that they should have found.

Look at the rise in casaerean deliveries as a result of the junk law suits by John Edwards et al.

Health care costs are also rising due to excessive marketing by drug companies. Everyone's got to have some disease or syndrome that requires this pill and that.