Reforming Healthcare....

Once again Ezra Klein puts together an exceptional post on rising health care costs in the US.

There is a lot to unpack in there:

Perhaps the most common complaint was that I omitted any mention of the medical malpractice system and administrative costs. As one reader wrote, ”you fail to address that more bureaucracy, more paperwork and persistent unchecked liability are at the root of price hikes.”

Let’s start with medical malpractice. Its direct costs — premiums, payouts, legal fees, etc. — amount to about one-half of 1 percent of total U.S. health-care spending. It’s barely a rounding error.

I specify “direct costs” because there’s a separate question related to “defensive medicine” — tests and treatments doctors prescribe to protect themselves from lawsuits. The problem is it’s very difficult to figure out what is and isn’t defensive medicine. In a world where patients and their families want every treatment that might help and where doctors and hospitals are paid more for every additional treatment they try, there are plenty of incentives pushing doctors to do more. Fear of lawsuits is simply one of many.

In October 2009, in response to a request from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the Congressional Budget Office took a careful look at the evidence on defensive medicine and concluded that aggressive reforms to the medical malpractice system “would reduce total national health care spending by about 0.5 percent.”

In general, this is one of those zombie ideas that just gets needlessly repeated. It is always due to some social maladroit exploiting the system. And even when it is shown time and time again, that it is not poor people abusing doctors and the legal system, the zombie just will not die.

Anyway it is a good read.

-Cheers