>But in Doug's example, the hospital was punished to the
>tune of $250k, and the docter was probably disciplined.
Well, my friend hasn't even filed a suit yet, so no one's out anything. And given the cap on awards, it becomes uneconomical to hire a lawyer whose fees would eat up a substantial portion of any settlement.
It would be the insurance company that would be out the $250k, and doctors are rarely disciplined. We've had some egregious cases of serial butchery in the U.S. that go undetected for years.
You may be assuming too much about the rationality of the U.S. legal and medical systems.
> The
>bigger question is the effect that tort law has on hospitals.
>Hypothetically, say an HMO saves $12m p.a. by running tests
>that are not clinically necessary and cost $10m p.a.. That
>means that $10m is not being spent on real patient care. And
>that goes unpublished and largely unacknowledged.
This sort of thing is a staple of the right-wing anecdote machine, in which my old Party of the Right pal Wally Olsen plays a major role. And it's greatly exaggerated, in the way most right-wing propaganda is. Wally's role in life is to get people thinking the extraordinary is ordinary.
Doug