Whatever else he said Wednesday evening at the town hall hosted by Rep. Jim Moran, D-VA, former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate Howard Dean let something incredibly candid slip out about President Obama’s health-care reform bill in Congress.
Asked by an audience member why the legislation does nothing to cap medical malpractice class-action lawsuits against doctors and medical institutions (aka “Tort reform”), Dean responded by saying: “The reason tort reform is not in the [health care] bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on. And that’s the plain and simple truth,”
Dean is a former physician, so he knows about skyrocketing medical malpractice insurance rates, and the role of the trial lawyers in fueling the “defensive medicine” approach among medical personnel who order too many tests and other sometimes unneeded procedures “just to be sure” and to protect themselves against litigation.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently described in an Examiner oped the medical-malpractice caps enacted by the state legislature at his urging that reversed a serious decline in the number of physicians practicing in the Lone Star state and the resulting loss of access to quality medical care available to Texas residents. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbor also shared some of his successes in this area in a recent Examiner oped.
Credit goes to the American Tort Reform Association’s Darren McKinney for catching this momentary outbreak of political honesty by Dean. McKinney has conveniently posted an audio recording of Dean speaking here, so you can listen for yourself. Mckinney has also offered more comment here, helpfully even including a link to the Examiner’s recent analysis of the degree to which trial-lawyer political contributions go to Democrats in Congress.
Those contributions are why Dean knows it would be a difficult task indeed for Obama to persuade congressional Democrats to do anything that might offend the trial-lawyers lobby. The Examiner’s David Freddoso and Kevin Mooney did the reporting on this link here.
