Quote Originally Posted by DuncanONeil View Post
I have wonder a bit about that. A quick look provided no quick answer. The statistics are all over the place, and do not always include hard numbers. Although I found a reported 60% of cases dropped but even that has a cost of $18,000 per case. 90% of cases that go to trial are in favor of the defendant with an average cost of $100,000.
"According to the American Medical Association, defensive medicine increases health systems costs by between $84 and $151 billion each year" An incomplete rendering of potential case is in excess of 1,000,000, that would come to about $47 billion per year. Plus the savings on "Defensive Medicine". Resulting in between $131 to $198 billion per year at the low end.

I did some reading on defensive medicine, and the estimates are quite wide, ranging from $25 billion to $200 billion a year. Taking the low number of $25 billion, it is still a considerable amount.

Tort reform, I'm assuming is to eliminate the frivilous lawsuits, but how many of those lawsuits are actually frivilous? Obama has said that this would affect health care costs by a fraction of the amount, even if so, it should be looked into.

The $47 billion you mentioned that goes into the savings, that's assuming 100% of those lawsuits have no merit. What are the most common cases of these lawsuits?


Thank you for the research, I didn't know about defensive medicine before.



Btw, previous question still stands, how would you go about tort reform? (To all, not just Duncan, and please no vague, 2-3 line response, but something that can be used for most cases)