Because Clearly The Problem With Health Insurance Is Lawyers

Chuckles wants to scrap health care reform and "do it right", in this case we're back to the same old GOP talking points of tort reform and abolishing interstate barriers.

First, tort reform. This is money — the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade — wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.
    
The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures, and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits — resources wasted on patients who don’t need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do.
    
In the 4,000-plus pages of the two bills, there is no tort reform. Indeed, the House bill actually penalizes states that dare “limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.” Why? Because, as Howard Dean has openly admitted, Democrats don’t want “to take on the trial lawyers.” What he didn’t say — he didn’t need to — is that they give millions to the Democrats for precisely this kind of protection.
    
Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.
    
Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn’t, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter.
    
And the answer to the resulting high Wisconsin orange prices wouldn’t be the establishment of a public option — a federally run orange-growing company in Wisconsin — to introduce “competition.” It would be to allow Wisconsin residents to buy Florida oranges.
    
But neither bill lifts the prohibition on interstate competition for health insurance. Because this would obviate the need — the excuse — for the public option, which the left wing of the Democratic party sees (correctly) as the royal road to fully socialized medicine.

There's stupid, and then there's National Review stupid, which is stupidity with intent to mislead other people into buying their particular brand of stupid by lying about how stupid it would be in actual practice.

(More after the jump...)


To whit:  if lawyers just couldn't sue doctors, we'd save "half a trillion" a year.  What Krauthammer is complaining about is saying that attempting to diagnose diseases when the test comes back negative is only done to stop lawsuits, not to find diseases.  It's like complaining that police work consists of unnecessary following of leads that don't pan out are done not to solve crimes but solely to prevent lawsuits, that pharmaceutical companies perform unnecessary human trials not to safeguard their products but only to prevent lawsuits, and anybody in America does things unnecessarily correctly not to do them correctly but to simply avoid lawsuits.  Why not take Chuckles's absurd argument to its endpoint?  Why have laws at all?

Second argument:  Insurance companies keep prices high because there's no interstate competition.  That's because A) insurance companies are perfectly happy with oligopolies in various states, and B) states have different laws on insurance companies can do.  Before there can be interstate insurance in this manner, states have to be on the same page.  That means there has to be a national standard:  which is what the public option and health insurance exchanges and all the new regs ands regulations are for in the first place.  Oh, and there's nothing stopping an insurance company from entering into another state.  If the problem really was competition, it would be solved by now.  But it's Republicans who don't want to take away the insurance company anti-trust exemption.  Seems to me they're not so interested in competition after all.

These arguments were stupid six months ago.  They're just as idiotic now.