On the recordApril 7, 1994
We've proposed two things in our bill. First was limitation on the percentage of lawyers' fees in the contingency cases. The second is something that has actually worked to hold down medical costs where it's been tried, and that is to give different kinds of doctors the benefit of medical practice guidelines developed by their own professional associations nationally, that if the doctor can demonstrate that he or she followed these guidelines, that raises a presumption that the doctor was not negligent. Now, this is a big deal in rural areas. This could be a big deal in rural Kansas, for example, where you've got a lot of general practitioners who are out in the country and somebody shows up with a broken arm or someone needs a baby delivered and a lot of doctors just won't do it anymore. They just won't do it. They won't even set simple fractures in some of the country places in my State. They'll send them to the biggest medical center, where there's a specialist, where the cost is 5 times as great. And so what we've tried to do--the State of Maine had an experience with this, basically developing simple practice guidelines. It's funny, we do it with pilots all the time; every time one of us gets up in an airplane with somebody else, we expect the pilot to have the practice guidelines. That's what they are. And they are checked off. And if we could give that to doctors and just not say that there could be no negligence but just say that that raises a presumption that the doctor did the right thing, we believe that would drive down malpractice rates considerably and let doctors free to practice medicine with common sense instead of just bending over backwards to order a lot of tests, for example, in cases oftentimes when they know they shouldn't do it but they're just guarding against a lawsuit. [Mr. Porterfield asked about employer responsibility for coverage of various part-time employees under the new plan.]
Source
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