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Competition, Choice Key to Health Care Reform, Says Expert

Revmitchell

Well-Known Member
Site Supporter
Cybercast News Service: Critics of universal health care have said the system would be like the DMV, where there would be so many lines and so much bureaucracy to get through. What do you think about that scenario?

Michael Tanner: Sure, all you have to do is look at the health care systems that the government runs today. The VA [Veterans Administration] is a national disgrace. Medicaid? That gives you poor quality at a high cost and Medicaid is $70 trillion in debt; that’s not a very good track record ….

Cybercast News Service: Are there any alternatives that you think would be better than a Universal system?

Michael Tanner: I think what we have to do is, number one, bring down the cost of health care so that more people can afford health care so that more people can get into the health care system and get the care they need. Second, we should be doing things to improve the quality of care and make sure that the people getting into the health care system are getting the best care they can ….



More Here


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Revmitchell said:
Michael Tanner: I think what we have to do is, number one, bring down the cost of health care so that more people can afford health care so that more people can get into the health care system and get the care they need. ….
And the best way to do that is comprehensive litigation reform.

I don't mind paying the doctor, at least I get something from him. What I resent is paying his lawyer and insurance agent so they can settle with the next idiot who sues him.

The reason we no longer have a hospital in our town in John Edwards and his fellow malpractice specialists.
 

Revmitchell

Well-Known Member
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North Carolina Tentmaker said:
And the best way to do that is comprehensive litigation reform.

I don't mind paying the doctor, at least I get something from him. What I resent is paying his lawyer and insurance agent so they can settle with the next idiot who sues him.

The reason we no longer have a hospital in our town in John Edwards and his fellow malpractice specialists.


Exactly! :thumbs:
 

TC

Active Member
Site Supporter
If someone goes in to have carpal tunnel fixed and comes out missing an arm, who should they sue if not the doctor?
 
TC said:
If someone goes in to have carpal tunnel fixed and comes out missing an arm, who should they sue if not the doctor?
I am not saying doctors should not be held accountable. In your case above the medical board should investigate. If the doctor was negligent, if he did not keep his training up, did not follow proper procedure or whatever else he should loose his medical license. His practice should be taken away. He can even be found criminaly liable and be sent to jail for negligence in the maiming of the individual. BUT, the guy who lost the arm did not just win the lottery. He should not be able to sue (IMHO) in civil court for monetary damages.

You lost your arm, that is bad, but if the doctor did everything he should have then why should he be cutting you a check? You knew there was some risk when you went into surgery.

What lawyers in general and Jon Edwards specifically did in North Carolina was he sued doctors when the damages were no fault of their own. Edwards specialized in suing OB doctors when children were born with birth defects. The result was that most of the OB doctors moved out of our state. A lot of hospitals closed down and many of the ones open now will not deliver babies. Those that do still deliver babies have to hold very expensive insurance policies to settle with the lawyers. That of course results in higher costs for the consumers.

In your example above TC who do you think really pays the cost of that lawsuit? In the long run it is not the doctor or his insurance, it is the next 10,000 people that need carpal tunnel surgery. And then eventualy the cost gets so high that people who need surgery can't get it.
 
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just-want-peace

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NCT, your post agrees with this email that I received yesterday!

Subject: Thoughtful Point Of View


This is very interesting! I never thought about it this way. Perhaps this is why so many physicians are conservatives or Republicans.

Thoughtful point of view

The Democrat Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer, and so is his wife, Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and, Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.

Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination a s a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work. The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich.

The Lawyers' Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America . And, so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers' Party, grow.

Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.

This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.

Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become 'adverse parties' of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.

Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politi cs by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great. When House Democrats sue America
in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.

We cannot expect the Lawyers' Party to provide real change, real reform, or real hope in America . Most America ns know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789. Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.

Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American societ y and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
 

StefanM

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North Carolina Tentmaker said:
I am not saying doctors should not be held accountable. In your case above the medical board should investigate. If the doctor was negligent, if he did not keep his training up, did not follow proper procedure or whatever else he should loose his medical license. His practice should be taken away. He can even be found criminaly liable and be sent to jail for negligence in the maiming of the individual. BUT, the guy who lost the arm did not just win the lottery. He should not be able to sue (IMHO) in civil court for monetary damages.
Why not? If the doctor was negligent, why should he keep the money?

Besides, what about lost wages?

I'm all for reform, but if the doctor was grossly negligent, causing irreparable harm, he should be forced to pay and should have his license revoked.

The victim shouldn't be left without recourse. Besides, any criminal actions would be minimal at best.

At the bare minimum, the individual should have the cost of future treatment covered.
 
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StefanM said:
Why not? If the doctor was negligent, why should he keep the money?

Besides, what about lost wages?

I'm all for reform, but if the doctor was grossly negligent, causing irreparable harm, he should be forced to pay and should have his license revoked.

The victim shouldn't be left without recourse. Besides, any criminal actions would be minimal at best.

At the bare minimum, the individual should have the cost of future treatment covered.
You are probably right that criminal penalties whould be minimal with our current system, but that is part of the problem.

I will go along with reparations for documented losses. That would include the cost of past and current treatment and lost wages but not legal representation. This should be part of the CRIMINAL lawsuit and it should also include jailtime for the convicted doctor. They should never be allowed to pay their way out of neglegence.

If you kill someone your fear should not be, wow this is going to cost me a lot of money, it should be, wow I am going to jail for a long time.

My beef is not with someone seeking to reclaim real losses but those who sue for million dollar settlements because they see doctor's deep pockets. In the case of Edwards he sued for birth defects that were purely heredical and in no way related to the doctor's care. That is why if you have had a child in the last 10 years they have offered to do all these prenatal tests on your baby in order to accurately forcast defects. Not because they can do anything about them short of killing your child, but they can document that you were told.
 

TC

Active Member
Site Supporter
I agree that there are way too many frivolous lawsuits out there and reform is needed across the board. However, too many of the reform proposals I have read severely limit the patients ability to get real compensation for real losses. That is not right.

In your example above TC who do you think really pays the cost of that lawsuit? In the long run it is not the doctor or his insurance, it is the next 10,000 people that need carpal tunnel surgery.

That happens in every business. So, maybe the laws in those cases need changing so that the guilty parties are the ones who pay for their mistakes and not others. Recent cases I heard of are patients having surgical instruments left in their abdomen when they were sewed up and one guy who went in to have his gallbladder removed (which is on the right side of the body) woke up finding his left kidney removed and his gallbladder still there. The hospitals covered for the doctors who are still practicing medicine without any real consequences for their actions.
 

sag38

Active Member
If there were a loser pays system it would probably eliminate a lot of frivolous lawsuits in the medical field and across the board. In other words, if you file a law suit against me and you lose then you are responsible to pay my court costs, lawyer's fees, and other expenses incurred in defending myself.
 
sag38 said:
If there were a loser pays system it would probably eliminate a lot of frivolous lawsuits in the medical field and across the board. In other words, if you file a law suit against me and you lose then you are responsible to pay my court costs, lawyer's fees, and other expenses incurred in defending myself.
Of course there are problems with that system as well. Lawyers would inflate their charges if someone other than their client was paying.

What about eliminating this practice where the lawyer gets a cut of the settlement if you win.
 

Revmitchell

Well-Known Member
Site Supporter
North Carolina Tentmaker said:
Of course there are problems with that system as well. Lawyers would inflate their charges if someone other than their client was paying.

What about eliminating this practice where the lawyer gets a cut of the settlement if you win.

Lawyers would then stop taking cases at all. This happened in Florida with work comp. Of course it was challenged and the FSC overturned it. Imagine that.
 
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