David Weldon: “I just want to touch on a very, very important issue and that is defensive medicine, the incorrect costs of liability on…”

“I just want to touch on a very, very important issue and that is defensive medicine, the incorrect costs of liability on the practice of medicine in the United States. Now, I practiced medicine for 15 years prior to being elected. I still see patients once a month. I practice defensive medicine. I know it is real. A study was done, it was published in the Journal of Economics in May of 1996, looking at the impact of the California tort reforms on health care costs and specifically they looked in the Medicare plan. And they discovered that there was a 5 to 9 percent reduction in health care costs brought about in the Medicare plan in the State of California attributable to the caps on noneconomic damages and less defensive medicine. This is an excellent study, and I would encourage all of my colleagues to read it. What this study also looked at was morbidity and mortality. They said it is not enough to just look at a decline in health care charges, but was it having an adverse effect on patients; were there more complications; were there more deaths. And lo and behold there were not.”