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Feel free to refresh yourself by coming up with some new ones then, because none of these is actually worth very much.
Malpractice insurance premiums are in insignificant contributor to overall health care costs. Even if tort reform were able to have an impact upon these premiums and every penny's worth of savings realized was somehow passed on to the consumer, there would be no noticeable change in health care costs.
What effect would you expect to have aside from creating a race to the bottom in regulatory standards as states competed either to keep or attract such significant employers into their domains? I believe the least regulated state is currently Mississippi, but whichever it is, why would a health insurance company in say New Jersey remain there when it could simply close there and reopen in Mississippi and escape all sorts of service obligations that work to the benefit of New Jersey health care consumers? Whose side do you claim to be on here?
No, this would be true for high-rate specialties, particularly those practicing in high-rate states, but even an OB/GYN in Minnesota would have paid an average of less than $20K for malpractice insurance in 2005, hardly a staggering sum. High-rate specialties (og/gyn, internist, general surgeon, neurosurgeon, etc.) account for fewer than 10% of all doctors, so the headlines may not be quite so applicable to the general medical community as some might think.
Paid volunteers, eh? And will the IRS be sending monitors out to these clinics to be sure that the doctors are really volunteering all the time they say they are? Then again, how is this actually going to lower national health care costs?
The government isn't proposing to get any further into the actual provision of services. It is proposing to get into the way health care is administered and financed because colossal amounts of waste and expense that is not actually related to health or health care goes on there. These are the sorts of things that are going to have to be eliminated if privately financed health care is to survive as the dominant model in this country.
That was Bush who was going to be a uniter, and Obama has made overture after overture to the right and been rebuffed at every turn. Some are beginning to tire of the process, and the right could eventually find itself sealed off and marginalized right out of existence if it is not careful. There were those who once railed against FDR as a Communist without ever realizng that the job he was about was saving capitalism from the clutches of Communism. There may be those today who vilify Obama as a destroyer of the private health insurance system without realizing that what he is offering is the last chance that will come along to preserve the private system. If reform should somehow fail now, the odds of a situation soon emerging that is crisis-like enough to fuel a sudden shift into an outright UHC system go way up. Be careful what you wish for.
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