Surprise! Press releases are manipulative
I saw this press release on medical malpractice insurance on Fark from The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights. I’ve never heard of these guys before, but according to their position page they’re in favor of regulating medical malpractice insurance instead of setting caps on the amount of money which can be awarded. Eh, I can’t say one way or the other about that issue because I haven’t read enough about it.
But reading this press release brought a few questions to mind. They say that malpractice suit payouts are a fraction of one percent of the total amount which Americans spend on health care. Okay, but how massive is one percent of the annual health care budget? I just figured it out, it’s roughly 15 billion dollars. There’s a lot of things that are going to be a fraction of 1 percent of the US health care budget.
And what about malpractice insurance premiums? These malpractice suit payouts are not uniformly distributed across the country. Some states (like Nevada) have little to no guidelines on how large the payouts can get. Because of this, the insurance premiums can be astronomical in certain fields of medicine. But the FTCR doesn’t seem to be taking into account the cost of insurance premiums in this press release.
I don’t know what the answers to these questions are, and they may not even have any bearing on the argument that FTCR was trying to make. I wish I could tell them to take those things into account and then get back to me.