We had several meetings this week to keep the idea of a tort reform bill alive as an addendum to health care reform. The problem is that Democrats have been beholden to the trial bar in these regards (and Republicans have also taken quite a bit of money from lawyers!). Republicans have the additional problem of not wanting to see the Democrats succeed in any area, and therefore don’t want to support tort reform with the President signing any bill that might come forth.

We have to overcome all of this. What surely isn’t possible politically (unfortunately) is to promote the best solution—namely, instituting caps on noneconomic damages, as has been so successfully achieved in California, Texas and a few other states. And, as you know, state legislatures and state courts have been attacking and reversing some of those laws which instituted noneconomic damage caps recently, under the direction of the trial bar. 

The ACC is working on bringing together representatives of industry, insurance, hospitals and hopefully other professional societies to suggest that major protections for medical malpractice assaults should be instituted as part of an incentive-based approach to implementing “meaningful use” in the future. After all, if physicians adopt a vision of meaningful use, which includes electronic health records, clinical decision support systems, use of registries, e-prescribing and other significant and costly innovations, there need to be incentives and a reward process. One of the best rewards might be to offer protections in Medicare and Medicaid from malpractice assault for those who adopt these kinds of innovations!

We are continuing to explore and promote this kind of important step, which could be linked to other innovations such as health courts and certificates of merit. Any such set of innovations would lead to a reduced number of patient safety incidents and reduced relative risk. This ought to cause a significant reduction in premiums in addition to any specific legislative protections we might develop. Stay tuned.

*** Image from Flickr (walknboston). ***