Rick Allen: “this bill will not reduce health care spending significantly. If you add up all the malpractice premiums in this…”

“this bill will not reduce health care spending significantly. If you add up all the malpractice premiums in this country, they represent one-half of 1 percent of the $1.4 trillion we spent on health care last year. Now, some States have problems. Maine does not impose caps on noneconomic damages, yet we have comparatively low insurance premiums. Maine has a mandatory pre-litigation screening panel for every medical malpractice case. The panel consists of one attorney, one doctor and one retired judge. This panel process weeds out the frivolous lawsuits and encourages legitimate cases to come to a fairly quick resolution. Sixteen other States have similar screening panels. States with screening panels should be exempt from the cap on noneconomic damages. There is no reason to impose this law on States which have figured out how to deal with this problem on their own. But this bill imposes a one-size-fits-all Federal rule in a traditional area of State jurisdiction. And this bill does something else. This bill sticks individual plaintiffs, particularly those who are children or unemployed or elderly, with perhaps a huge lifetime cost because of severe injuries, instead of sharing those costs through our insurance system. So, once again, the Republican majority is basically saying it is better to stick the loss on those who suffer it than to share that loss broadly through insurance.”