Anchorage Daily News Tells the Truth About Medical Malpractice…Despite Sarah Palin!

Big news out of the “last frontier” state!  

The Anchorage Daily News (Alaska’s largest paper) has taken a negative view of Alaska’s brutal “tort reform” law after 23 years of seemingly endless demands by state lawmakers to strip patients’ rights.

It seems like only yesterday (actually, it was 1986) that insurance giant, Lloyds of London, sent its legal goons to Alaska and threatened state lawmakers that if they didn’t enact severe restrictions on Alaskans' legal rights, Lloyd’s would pull of the state, in essence risking the collapse of Alaska’s economy.  Their threat worked and Alaska enacted its first in a series of “caps” on compensation for injured Alaskans, among other severe so-called “tort reform.”  (See a good explanation of this history in the Center for Justice & Democracy’s report, Shakedown: How the Insurance Industry Exploits A Nation in Times of Crisis.)

Fast forward to 1997…to the surprise of no one who has studied the relationship (or lack thereof) between medical malpractice claims and insurance rates, those 1986 restrictions on patients’ rights failed to have any real effect on premiums.  Unfortunately, this only convinced businesses and the Alaska insurance lobby to clamor even harder for more and deeper restrictions on Alaskans’ rights.  (You can find a summary of Alaska’s laws in Center for Justice & Democracy’s 1999 report, Premium Deceit.)

In 2005, the saga continued.  Still convinced medical malpractice claims were somehow creating a “crisis” in the state, despite the plethora of anti-patient laws already on the books, lawmakers lowered the cap on compensation for injured patients even further! 

So today, we say a well-deserved, and long overdue Eureka!  The Anchorage Daily News has decided enough is enough, calling for a merciful end to almost 25 years of non-stop unfounded attacks on the rights of injured patients. Check out some of what the paper had to say:

In Alaska, we've already got tort reform….

[But] so far, tort reform has not helped drop health care costs for consumers….

A state Department of Labor report last month showed health care costs in Anchorage are on a steady upward trajectory -- they quadrupled between 1982 and 2009.

Health care costs in Missouri, which also capped non-economic damages in 2005, have also continued rising, according to an Aug. 29 article in the Kansas City Star. The same is true of Texas, which enacted "even more stringent tort reforms," the article said.

Supporters of tort reform say it also helps reduce costly "defensive medicine." The notion is that doctors will quit ordering tests, procedures and consultations that are done just to protect themselves from malpractice claims, and not because they have medical benefit.

The Congressional Budget Office says there's not conclusive evidence that doctors are practicing so-called defensive medicine to an extent that would affect health care costs….

The Congressional Budget Office noted that malpractice costs amounted to less than 2 percent of overall health spending in one year studied, 2002. Even a 25 percent to 30 percent reduction in medical malpractice premiums would not significantly affect total health care costs, says the CBO report "Limiting Tort Liability for Medical Malpractice." …

The threat of medical malpractice lawsuits cuts down on health spending in one important way. It puts pressure on medical professionals to avoid common medical errors -- such as transmitting infections that could be avoided through hand-washing -- that drive up costs and even kill people. The Institute of Medicine has estimated that at least 44,000 and maybe as many as 98,000 people die each year from medical mistakes in hospitals….

BOTTOM LINE: Alaska's experience and that of other states suggest tort reform isn't going to do much to cure costly flaws in the American medical system.

Now, as a semi-gratuitous post script…we have no idea whether Sarah Palin will take the Daily News’s recent analysis to heart the next time she’s talking about medical malpractice on Facebook (or for that matter, whether she even reads her home state’s largest newspaper).  But eternal optimists that we are, we’re keeping our fingers crossed!