WASHINGTON — A panel of academics said Tuesday curbing medical malpractice litigation is not the “silver bullet” needed to slay the werewolf of rising health care costs.
“Health policy myths become convenient truths,” said Gregg Bloche, a graduate of both the medical and law schools at Yale and a former visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Bloche has written extensively on the implications of policy on both doctors and patients.
Bloche, one of several speakers at a panel discussion organized by the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, said costs associated with medical malpractice account for “a small and steady fraction” of health care costs and cannot be blamed for the continuing increase in health care costs.
Total health care spending estimates for 2007 topped $2.2 trillion.
Bloche was joined by experts in the legal, medical and economics fields.
“The bottom line is that [malpractice] tort reforms don’t work as well as proponents say they do,” said Kathryn Zeiler, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown and a widely-published author on the subject of malpractice reform.
Zeiler, citing reform studies spanning four decades, said findings are conflicting and at most indicate only meager cost savings as a result of medical malpractice reforms.
The panelists said politicians make points that are anecdotal rather than statistical and tend to make bloated claims about the negative impact of medical malpractice litigation on health care costs.
“Where you stand depends on where you sit,” said David Hyman, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pointing to the partisan aspect of the medical malpractice debate.
Hyman also said the bulk of costs surrounding malpractice suits are associated with those cases that go beyond pretrial settlements. As a result, proposed reforms such as “review panels” would have a limited effect on curbing costs.
“Tort reform is not a magical solution to the problems with our health care system,” Hyman said. “There are dysfunctions in our system, and they ought to be addressed. But we ought to be modest in our expectations.”
Clarification: An earlier posting of this story paraphrased Bloche as saying medical malpractice costs roughly $55 billion annually. Bloche estimated costs associated with malpractice to be “several percentage points” of overall health care costs, but did not cite a specific figure. Medill regrets the error.