David Weldon: “I practiced defensive medicine for 15 years before I was elected to Congress. Defensive medicine is extremely costly.…”

“I practiced defensive medicine for 15 years before I was elected to Congress. Defensive medicine is extremely costly. The way it works is very simple. The patient comes in. You think the patient has something. And then you think of all the other things that it could be and how you could be sued if you missed those things, so you order more and more tests. They discovered that over time after the cap on damages went into place and the threat of very, very excessive damages went away that charges for two diagnostic codes, the two codes they looked at were unstable angina and myocardial infarction, went down and there was no increase in morbidity and mortality. In other words, quality was maintained while charges went down. This study was published in 1995 in the Journal of Economics. They argued that the high cost of litigation cost the Medicare plan billions of dollars a year in unnecessary procedures and tests. They further went on to say that it cost, in 1995 dollars, our health care system $50 billion a year. Today that figure is estimated at over $100 billion a year.”