New Study Concludes Medical Malpractice Awards Not the Cause of Rising Healthcare Costs

 Posted on May 10, 2013 in General

By: Daniel M. Kotin

For years, study-after-study have rebuked the claims of the healthcare industry that malpractice awards are driving up the costs of medical across our country.  Yet, it continues to be reassuring when the source of these study results are the top medical institutions in America.

On May 1, 2013, four researchers from John Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland released a review of medical malpractice payouts and concluded that they constitute “far less than one-percent of national medical expenditures in the United States.”  Quite simply, malpractice awards are not the cause of any medical crisis.

The study concluded that the real cause of increasing medical costs is the extraordinary amount of tests and other diagnostic procedures being performed on patients.  The study’s leader, Marty Makary, M.D., concluded that reform efforts should focus on the amount of defensive medicine being practiced, rather than on the creation of caps on medical malpractice awards.  He said that the results of this study called for more research to “determine what interventions might prevent the type of errors that result in catastrophic payouts, with the overall goal for improving patient safety and reducing costs at the same time.”

We should applaud this type of study which focuses on the real need for reform in the healthcare industry rather than falsely embracing the tort reform movement for nothing more than political gain.