TORT REFORM

Sarah Palin is using her Facebook page to great effect. Her post on "death panels" got the Senate to announce the end of mandatory death counseling your doctor would have had to provide every five years. (Which sounded a lot like nagging.)

Now, she's writing about tort reform in "No Health Care Reform Without Legal Reform"

As Governor of Alaska, I learned a little bit about being a target for frivolous suits and complaints (Please, do I really need to footnote that?). I went my whole life without needing a lawyer on speed-dial, but all that changes when you become a target for opportunists and people with no scruples. Our nation’s health care providers have been the targets of similar opportunists for years, and they too have found themselves subjected to false, frivolous, and baseless claims. To quote a former president, “I feel your pain.”

So what can we do? First, we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined. For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he'll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.

Read the whole thing.

Many states, including my own state of Alaska, have enacted caps on lawsuit awards against health care providers. Texas enacted caps and found that one county’s medical malpractice claims dropped 41 percent, and another study found a “55 percent decline” after reform measures were passed. That’s one step in health care reform. Limiting lawyer contingency fees, as is done under the Federal Tort Claims Act, is another step. The State of Alaska pioneered the “loser pays” rule in the United States, which deters frivolous civil law suits by making the loser partially pay the winner’s legal bills. Preventing quack doctors from giving “expert” testimony in court against real doctors is another reform.

[Emphasis mine.]
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There's a link at the right to the 1018 pg proposed legislation.

The bill establishes a Health Choices Administration will be an independent agency of the Executive Branch to be headed by a Health Care Commissioner. Appointed by the president with advice and consent of the Senate. Making it a cabinet post. (See powers. (Starting PDF pg 41)