Winners and Losers

One of my prime objections any time the government gets involved in areas that private enterprise should rule is that they should not have to right to decide who wins and who loses. Another glaring example of the folly of government involvement is the current health care debacle.

One of the largest hidden costs of health care today is the cost of malpractice insurance each and every doctor must pay. The number of frivolous lawsuits is the prime reason that this is true. Most doctors at one time in their career will face a malpractice suit of some form. This results in outlandish insurance rates for malpractice insurance.

You may remember back to the Bush administration that the fact that Bush and Cheney both had backgrounds in the oil business. This was of course enough evidence to the mind of a leftist that they were paying off the oil industry by not forcing additional regulation on them. No such charge can be found today though. Barak Obama has a noted law background as does his wife. In all of the reforms he wants for the health care industry none can be found that will add additional regulation on torts. Is this not a 'payoff'? Using the same microscope used in the last administration it would be, but of course it is not. It is a simple case of the President making the rules and deciding who wins and who loses. In his mind 'Big Law' is not a villain but virtuous so he makes sure that they are not touched.

Any realistic look at this situation has to show us that tort reform could be one step of many in reducing heath care costs. A system where the loser of the suit would pay all the legal fees would go a long way to reducing the cost of insurance and therefore overall overhead to the doctors. If the suits that are on the more frivolous end would be given a second thought since the risk would be much higher. There is simply no risk to someone bringing these suits today. Since the people writing the laws as well as the President have law backgrounds I wouldn't hold my breath on seeing it happen. Since they won the election they get to pick to winners and losers. This doesn't sound like the system our founders put in place, but it is the corrupt system we have given ourselves.