Promoted from diaries. And while I’d like to believe that someone was paying attention, alas… – Moe Lane
Many times commenters quickly pick up and spread the latest news on threads. Today someone at Hot Air mentioned something, that while off topic on that thread, is going to be the topic of news this weekend!
Sarah Palin has another Facebook Note up today . She goes for the jugular with this one:
President Obama’s health care "reform" plan has met with significant criticism across the country. Many Americans want change and reform in our current health care system. We recognize that while we have the greatest medical care in the world, there are major problems that we must face, especially in terms of reining in costs and allowing care to be affordable for all. However, as we have seen, current plans being pushed by the Democratic leadership represent change that may not be what we had in mind — change which poses serious ethical concerns over the government having control over our families’ health care decisions. In addition, the current plans greatly increase costs of health care, while doing lip service toward controlling costs.
We need to address a REAL bipartisan reform proposition that will have REAL impacts on costs and quality of patient care. …
This is the silver bullet quote (my emphasis):
First, we cannot have health care reform
without tort reform. The two are intertwined.
She highlights the deceit of trying to use the cost of health care as a reason for socialized medicine as she hits the heart of Democrat hypocrisy:
For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he’ll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” [1] Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.
Dr. Stuart Weinstein, with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, recently explained the problem:
”The medical liability crisis has had many unintended consequences, most notably a decrease in access to care in a growing number of states and an increase in healthcare costs.”…
Dr. Weinstein makes good points, points completely ignored by President Obama. Dr. Weinstein details the costs that our out-of-control tort system are causing the health care industry and notes research that “found that liability reforms could reduce defensive medicine practices, leading to a 5 percent to 9 percent reduction in medical expenditures without any effect on mortality or medical complications.”…
So I have new questions for the president: Why no legal reform? Why continue to encourage defensive medicine that wastes billions of dollars and does nothing for the patients? Do you want health care reform to benefit trial attorneys or patients?…
If you want to save health care, let’s listen to our doctors too. There should be no health care reform without legal reform. There can be no true health care reform without legal reform.
Game, Set, Match.
Hot Air commenter jp, mentioned an IBD Editorial, They’re Coming For Your Tonsils , which focuses on the role of lawyers and lawsuits on health care costs:
Trial lawyers helped create a medical crisis through malpractice suits that raise costs while driving doctors from their practices….
The accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers says about 10% of the cost of medical service is attributable to medical malpractice lawsuits. Roughly 2% is caused by direct costs of the lawsuits; an additional 5% to 9% is due to expenses run up by defensive medicine.
On Monday, Moe Lane said he’d been trying to figure out how to get Sarah Palin to discuss this. Well, from his post to Sarah’s Facebook!
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H/T: Hot Air commenter deidre; Conservatives4Palin : Facebook link, Hot Air commenter jp, IBD.
Crossposted to J’s Cafe Nette and in a modified format to Be John Galt .
