Does Tort Reform Have a Positive Effect in the Health Care Industry?

Leflar's Analysis Of Medical Malpractice Reform Leflar (2013) analyzes how medical malpractice reform is affecting the health care industry in his medical ethics study entitled "Medical Malpractice Reform Measures and Their Effects." Leflar describes three types of reform initiatives placed into effect in the recent past: limited-liability reforms which favor the health care providers, procedural reforms said to promote safe harbor laws, and systematic overhaul reforms which "move liability away from physicians to hospitals or administrative no-fault compensation systems" (Leflar, 2013, p. 306).

Leflar also assesses the current state of reforms already in place, such as damage caps, and that they ineffective at achieving the aims sought by medical malpractice reformers. Leflar suggests that more attention should be given to reforms which concentrate on no-fault systems, safe harbor laws, patient comp funds, early offers, etc.

Leflar notes how malpractice law stems from the tort law and that the earliest laws tended to favor the health care industry by making the goal to reduce the number of claims on the behalf of patients and families. "Payout limitations" were the effect of these early reforms (Leflar, 2013, p. 307).

These early reforms were followed by the next generation of reform laws, which focused on early offer and "sorry" laws, which failed to produce the sought for effect: neither care givers nor patients were protected mainly because of systems that did not support transparency, thus limiting physicians who prefer disclosure and patients who suffer from it and must seek amends through the courts.

What is essentially at stake, as Leflar shows again and again, is a health care industry that behaves more like a cartel than what its name seems to imply. I have seen this first hand in my own experience in hospitals, where doctors are encouraged by pharmaceutical companies to give their patients certain drugs, whose efficacy is "proven" by certain tests, etc.

I have seen it first hand in hospitals where doctors are encouraged to perform scheduled c-sections on pregnant women, a process which blunts the natural process of child-birth but guarantees extra profits for a number of industries operating in conjunction with the doctor (the anesthesiologist, etc.). What is most alarming about Leflar's study is that it points out how complicated the law, which initially served to protect the industry, has become and how difficult it is for a patient to receive impartial and affordable health care.

Too many lives, careers, and profits-to-be-made are at stake, thus muddying the waters of what should be a noble profession, corrupting it instead by an industry mantra that is at odds with the Hippocratic Oath. This mantra has profits not patients at heart and it is further corrupted by a political process that also has corporate profits at heart, not average Joe constituents.

It is a shame that the noble profession of health care has been degraded by a system that is engineered to lock in evermore and ever greater profits, using laws and organizations like the American Medical Association to further their aims. In all of this, the patient is lost and not his rights but the rights of the practitioner.