THINKING SMALL:

GOP can streamline health law, improve malpractice system (Boston Globe, November 7, 2010)

[T]here is a way for the Republicans to improve on the law — by strengthening its anemic effort to reform this country’s dysfunctional medical-malpractice system. The current system fosters costly defensive medicine, provides benefits to too few deserving victims of physicians’ mistakes, forces doctors in many specialties to buy high-premium insurance policies, and discourages the open reporting of treatment errors, even though such information could lead to genuine improvements in medical care.

Congressional Democrats, many of them beholden to lawyers who like the tort system as it is, made only a token effort to fix the malpractice morass. The law calls for just $50 million to finance tort-reform demonstration projects, and places limits on what these projects can offer as alternatives to lawsuits. Republicans should propose a much more robust program of resolving medical errors in ways that make patients whole and help the health care system become as mistake-free as possible.

While they are at it, Republicans could also find Democratic allies to deep-six a revenue-raising mechanism in the new law that only an accountant could love: the requirement starting in 2012 that all businesses submit a form to the IRS for every purchase of more than $600. Yes, this whole new level of paperwork could head off some tax-dodging, but it is not worth the trouble.

That's a good start, but it's the small potatoes. The GOP and President Obama could make health care truly universal--starting at birth--with the use of HSAs.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 7, 2010 6:52 AM