Political Quotes

“Mr. President, this is an amendment that actually saves some money. It is an amendment that instructs the Judiciary Committee to produce savings of over $60 billion by cutting back on frivolous lawsuits through medical malpractice reform. Today, patients and physicians alike are held hostage by a broken medical liability system that continues to incentivize defensive medicine, which leads to a lot of wasteful spending and unnecessary tests and studies. PricewaterhouseCoopers has released a study showing that the estimated cost of this defensive medicine is about $210 billion a year. Comprehensive medical malpractice reform has been proposed by Simpson-Bowles, by Rivlin-Domenici, and by other bipartisan deficit- reduction groups. It has also been examined in depth as a means for deficit reduction by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. In fact, CBO has told us that sensible medical malpractice reform could reduce the deficit by over $62 billion over 10 years. CBO also points out that comprehensive reform could alleviate shortages of certain kinds of physicians around the country. The amendment provides maximum flexibility for the Judiciary Committee in allowing the committee to determine the best way to achieve deficit reduction by reforming the current system. This flexibility, by the way, includes the ability to enact reforms that would only come into effect if States fail to act.…”