David Weldon: “the study earlier referred to follows: [From Forbes Magazine, Jan. 27, 1997] Rx: Radical Lawyerectomy (By Peter Huber)…”

“the study earlier referred to follows: [From Forbes Magazine, Jan. 27, 1997] Rx: Radical Lawyerectomy (By Peter Huber) How do you trim $20 billion a year from Medicare? That's about what it will take to stave off bankruptcy. The easiest way: amputate lawyers. It can be done. In 1995 Congress immunized community health care centers from malpractice suits. The federal government now covers the claims incurred by these federally subsidized clinics--claims are heard by a judge, not a jury, and there are no punitive awards. The clinics save an estimated $40 million in malpractice insurance. That funds treatment for an additional half-million indigent patients. Why stop there? The country spends about $8 billion a year treating elderly heart-disease patients. Cap awards, abolish punitive damages, implement a few other direct, financial limits on medical malpractice suits, and you reduce hospital expenditures on cardiac patients by 5% to 9%. If limits like these had been written into federal law, nationwide spending on cardiac disease in the late 1980s would have been $600 million a year lower. Extrapolate these results to medical spending generally--a debatable but reasonable enough basis for estimation--and you find that tort reform would save the country as a whole well over $50 billion a year. But how much more negligent medicine would that encourage? How many more cardiac patients would die?…”