Medical Malpractice Highlights Health Care Split
President Obama says he gets that Democrats and Republicans have philosophical differences on the health care. One great divide: tort reform, where there's bipartisanship in the rhetoric, but a hard-line split on whether to cap plaintiffs' claims.
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Tort reform is another issue that traditionally stirs up opposition in health care debate, but not this year. The bill doesn't set limits on medical malpractice lawsuits. And yet, tort reform is not galvanizing opponents the way it used to.
NPR's Peter Overby reports.
PETER OVERBY: President Obama and the Democrats have managed to co-opt tort reform, not the whole issue, but apparently, enough of it. At the White House summit, the president turned to Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma.
President BARACK OBAMA: Tom Coburn, you and Richard Burr have talked about incentivizing and allowing states to experiment much more vigorously with ways to reduce frivolous lawsuits, to pursue settlements, to reduce defensive medicine. That's something I'd like to see if we could potentially get going.
OVERBY: The president and congressional Democrats have already proposed pilot projects for just that, so states can explore ways to reduce medical errors and avert lawsuits. And this week, the White House offered to beef up the funding. But here's the part of tort reform that Democrats won't touch, really, the heart of the issue: dollar caps on lawsuits. A legal limit on pain and suffering payments is like the gold medal for business interests. They've never captured the gold, not even when Republicans had both Congress and the White House. House Republican Leader John Boehner made a grab for it at the summit talking about controlling health care costs.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio): Why can't we do something about the biggest cost driver, which is medical malpractice in the defensive medicine that doctors practice?
OVERBY: Actually, biggest driver is a bit over the top. The Congressional Budget Office says tort reform would cut federal health care spending by about two percent. The GOP problem is if they lost in an essential ally, the American Medical Association definitely wants caps in the long term, but what it wants now is the health care bill. Here's AMA President James Rohack on tort reform.
Dr. JAMES ROHACK (President, American Medical Association): The language wasn't as strong as what we ideally would like to see, which is caps on non-economic damages. But we also recognize that it's an important first step.
OVERBY: A step that would be developed in those state pilot projects. And besides, Rohack says, the AMA has other issues before Congress. They range from childhood immunizations to doctors' Medicare reimbursements.
Dr. ROHACK: So we go in there with a huge smorgasbord of different things trying to help the health system, whereas the trial bar(ph) goes in there and just says, you know, we just got this one little thing, just leave us alone and, you know, don't deal with it.
OVERBY: The trial lawyers - the other powerhouse in this fight and a mainstay of Democratic fundraising. Their organization, the American Association for Justice, gave $1.2 million to Democratic lawmakers last year. Linda Lipsen, a vice president of the association, scoffs at the cry for tort reform.
Ms. LINDA LIPSEN (Vice President, American Association for Justice): You know, tort reform is part of the talking points from some on the Republican side. Tort reform really isn't going to get votes.
OVERBY: But if tort reform truly isn't moving votes, it may have less to do with a trial lawyer's clout and more to do with the American Medical Association and its decision to go for half a loaf.
Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
