Tort Reform is Key Health Care Fix

RUSH: Barack Obama just began a health care summit at the White House. Another one of these summits where there will be breakout groups after a couple of opening statements and they’ll report back later today to tell us exactly what it was that they all came up with for solutions. So today it’s fix health care. Can I give you a very simple health care fix? Seriously, now, very simple without even restructuring the system per se, without going into circumstances and policy where we reorient so that the customer determines the price of things. Right now the customer doesn’t determine the price in health care. That’s what’s wrong with it. The customer does not determine the price. But without even going there, do you know what you could do to drop health care costs dramatically? Tort reform. One of the largest contributing factors to the cost of health care today, malpractice insurance. It’s driving doctors out of the business. Obama has promised that he’s going to squeeze payments to doctors even further. He’s going to squeeze payments to hospitals. He’s going to squeeze payments to insurers, meaning he’s going to decide what prices are. That’s not going to do any better than that’s happening today, where insurance companies and the government working together determine what prices are.

The only real long-term solution is when consumers determine prices by what they’re willing to pay for, as it is in every other sector of the capitalist markets, for the most part. But if you want to have a temporary, giant reduction in cost, you implement tort reform and a simple element of tort reform, and that is, in any tort action brought, the loser pays. So you, you’re in McDonald’s. You order some Chicken McNuggets. They don’t have to any. You call 911. This happened in Port St. Lucie, Rio Linda East. You go to McDonald’s, you order some Chicken McNuggets, they don’t have any, you call 911, you call 911 not once, you call 911 not twice, you call 911, you call the cops and the fire department because McDonald’s doesn’t have Chicken McNuggets. Call Obama. The answer to this problem, call Obama. Okay, so this person that calls 911 three times over no Chicken McNuggets, some fast moving lawyer sees the story, calls her up and says, ‘I’ll take your case on contingency. We’ll sue McDonald’s for $25 million for misrepresentation in advertising, menu and so forth. They didn’t have what they promised, they wanted to charge you for it nevertheless, and you were so distraught you had to call the cops.’

If tort reform existed and the loser in such an action had to pay, the woman would never bring the case. Now, you attach and apply this to health care, where professional hustlers — and they’re not all this way — but professional hustlers in the tort bar, these plaintiff lawyers, they hustle around, they read the papers, they mine for people like this who have been somehow mistreated or misdiagnosed or whatever they want to claim by a doctor, and they want to sue for big bucks, not for any legitimate reason, just to get some money. Today the simplest way for that to happen is for the doctor to pay in a settlement to avoid costs of litigation, but if loser pays were implemented, that would end all of this, and you would lower health care costs dramatically with just that one move. Now, I know, ‘Rush, Rush, it sounds really brilliant, why don’t they do it?’ Because the people who write the laws in this country are all lawyers, and the Democrats receive most of their financial contributions from the tort bar, from the plaintiffs bar.

And so it’s a dirty little secret. Just follow the money trail, folks. It’s always all about money, and it’s a way for Democrat constituents to get rich, once again feeding off the achiever class, the entrepreneurial class, just go get what they’ve got, penalize them for their hard work, penalize them for their risks, but if you just institute loser pays, it’s that simple, you would find the costs of health care dropping dramatically, and then we could get to the policy aspects of reforming it even further.