Medical Malpractice and the U.S. Health Care System

Medical malpractice lawsuits are common and controversial in the United States. Since early 2002, doctors\u27 insurance premiums for malpractice coverage have soared. As Congress and state governments debate laws intended to stabilize the cost of insurance, doctors continue to blame lawyers and lawyers continue to blame doctors and insurance companies. This book, which is the capstone of three years\u27 comprehensive research funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, goes well beyond the conventional debate over tort reform and connects medical liability to broader trends and goals in American health policy. Contributions from leading figures in health law and policy marshal the best available information, present new empirical evidence, and offer cutting-edge analysis of potential reforms involving patient safety, liability insurance and tort litigation

Introduction

With the United States embroiled in its third major medical malpractice crisis in the past thirty years, this volume brings together an array of experts from law, medicine, social science, and business to explore the public policy of medical liability. As malpractice premiums continue to rise, doctors and lawyers engage in bitter debates across the country, and legislators struggle to comprehend and consider a myriad of proposed medical liability reforms, this volume provides an explanation of malpractice policy past and present – and a set of promising paths forward. The major failing of the current debate over malpractice reform is that it ignores the relationship between medical malpractice policy and core characteristics of American health care. For reasons both deliberate and circumstantial that this book describes, conventional approaches to medical liability barely pay lip service to the persistent inequities of access to health care and health insurance in the United States, to the recent revelation of serious safety and quality problems in medical “systems,” or to the decades-long battle being waged against rising public and private health care expenditures. Yet these forces are largely responsible for the severity of the current malpractice crisis and point the way to solutions far more promising than the measures – little changed since the 1970s – on which malpractice reformers and their opponents both fixate. The authors\u27 collective purpose is to close the gap between malpractice policy and health policy

Congressional Intrusion to Specify State Voting Dates for National Offices

Through the nation's first century, states used their concurrent constitutional right to schedule presidential and House elections at widely varying times. Senators were also elected within the states at diverse times. This study examines the gradual establishment of uniform election dates and offers an explanation of why Congress felt it appropriate to override state autonomy to eventually establish uniformity of state practices. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.