>It's not possible to disentangle unnecessary tests due to
>litigation and unnecessary tests due to other political
>pressures to test for everything (it's being widely
>promoted by the UK health lobby for reasons unconnected to
>the law). But if doctors' professionalism means that they
>continue to do the right thing, that does not excuse a culture
>of litigation that encourages bad practices.
You've been asserting something that basically isn't true. My concern for the pedigree of the idea, which annoys you so much, is that it's a right-wing canard circulated for a specific purpose - protecting insurers and the medical industry, an important Republican constituency. Why you should take it up is a mystery, though the second pedigree issue that annoyed you, your history with the RCP, seems to be relevant, since that organization loved to pick up right wing arguments for allegedly leftish purposes. I don't say this because I'm an enemy of the RCP; I wrote a piece for LM, and liked many of its alums that I've met, starting with James Heartfield. But this is one of those perverse things that's just wrong in an unproductive way.
Doug