Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I yield myself an additional 2 minutes. That is a very real phenomenon confirmed by countless studies in which healthcare workers conduct many additional costly tests and procedures with no medical value. That is charged to our Federal taxpayers, and it is simply to avoid excessive litigation costs. A survey published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that 91 percent of the over 1,000 doctors surveyed ``reported believing that physicians order more tests and procedures than needed to protect themselves from malpractices suits.'' The study also asked: ``Are protections against unwarranted medical malpractice lawsuits needed to decrease the unnecessary use of diagnostic tests?'' And the answer, an identical number: 91 percent of the doctors surveyed agreed. But there is one Newsweek reporter who described the personal experience of individual doctors this way: ``Typical was one doctor, who had a list as long as my arm of procedures ER docs perform . . . for no patient benefit. They include following a bedside sonogram . . . with an ``official'' sonogram because it's easier to defend yourself to a jury if you've ordered the second one; a CT scan for every child who bumped his or her head, to rule out things that can be diagnosed just fine by observation; X-rays that do not guide treatment, such as for a simple broken arm; CTs for suspected appendicitis that has been perfectly well diagnosed without it.…”