Credit/Blame Bush for Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

@openid.aol.com/runnswim:

Interesting, I just watched that clip this morning, after I read this column from the San Fransisco Examiner. Perhaps the numbers Senator Kyl quoted weren’t so farfetched.

Here’s what is stopping tort reform
By: James R. Copland
October 15, 2009

In his Sept. 9, nationally televised speech before a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama made news by saying that medical-malpractice litigation “may be contributing to unnecessary costs” in the U.S. health care system.

Since then, trial-lawyer advocates — including their lobbying arm, the American Association for Justice (AAJ), and various allied “consumer” groups such as the Center for Justice and Democracy — have been engaged in a fierce counterattack. Front-and-center among the lawyer-advocates’ arguments is that litigation is too small a piece of the health care puzzle to make much difference.

In a letter to Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, such self-styled consumer groups claimed that costs consumed by medical-malpractice litigation represent “less than 0.6 percent of all health care spending.”

To reach this number, the groups are playing a deceptive fraction game, in which they embrace a small numerator based on a ridiculously narrow interpretation of litigation costs and a large denominator encompassing every dollar spent on health care.

The lawyer-allies would count as litigation expenses only the malpractice litigation claims paid out directly by insurance companies in a given year. Conveniently, the lawyers’ advocates ignore self-insured hospitals and legal-defense costs, not to mention defensive medicine — the cost of excessive tests, procedures and referrals that doctors order due to fear of liability.

Ninety-three percent of doctors say they have practiced defensive medicine, and the real cost savings from reforming malpractice liability stem from curbing such wasteful practice. Academic researchers have reached different conclusions on how much money tort reforms save by preventing defensive medical practice, ranging from 2 percent of all health costs in some studies to as much as 9 percent in others.

Such a percentage itself is much larger than it might seem. If we look at the difference in U.S. health spending relative to that in other developed countries — such as Canada, Germany or France — medical-malpractice reform would eliminate anywhere from 6 to 27 percent of all additional health costs.

While defensive medicine costs a lot, it is hardly the only cost-escalation stemming from lawsuit abuse. The lawyers’ advocates try to ignore the vast health-related litigation — apart from medical-malpractice lawsuits, which target nursing homes, pharmaceutical manufacturers and HMOs.

And the cost of this litigation matters, too. From 1992 to 2003, the cost of litigation per nursing-home bed rose 700 percent. When trial lawyers almost sued the vaccine manufacturers out of existence in the 1980s, they drove up vaccine prices as much as 4,000 percent.

After that vaccine-liability crisis, Congress acted responsibly to establish an alternative compensation system outside the tort system, which hurt the trial bar’s profits but preserved the vaccine markets. But Congress will not take any meaningful steps to curb lawsuit abuse as a part of comprehensive health reform this year, notwithstanding that 83 percent of the American public wants them to do so.

The reason is clear — money. The trial lawyers’ political action committee is the second-largest donor to Democrats’ federal campaigns, and lawyers gave $127 million to Congressional candidates in the 2008 political cycle — more than doctors and health professionals, hospitals and nursing homes, pharmaceutical companies and HMOs, combined.

As medical doctor and former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean admitted in a town-hall meeting this summer, “The reason why tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers.”

It’s a myth to think that liability reform alone could cure the nation’s health care problems, but it is equally a myth to think it doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, because of the trial lawyers’ stranglehold on Congress, meaningful liability reform — this year — is simply wishful thinking.

James R. Copland is the director of the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute and the project manager for its Trial Lawyers, Inc. series, including a brand-new Health Care update.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/columns/oped_contributors/Heres-what-is-stopping-tort-reform-64192382.html

@Wordsmith (#107):

Firstly, don’t misunderstand what follows. I don’t really disagree with #107. I think that there is a consensus that the decision to award the Prize to Obama was, to be charitable, ill-advised. Yesterday, one of the 5 Norwegians on the Peach Prize panel expressed surprise that Obama didn’t look happy but instead looked uncomfortable when he gave his first public comments regarding his award. I’m sure that Obama would have loved to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but he’d have greatly preferred for it to come down the road, when it wouldn’t be viewed as a joke.

I did read something else yesterday, however, which was of interest. It turns out that, in Alfred Nobel’s will, the award was to be given (to the person who contributed most, during the past year) to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”. The Nobel jury member asked who has done a better job in these areas during the past year than Obama, specifically mentioning the end of the Czech/Polish anti-missile program and the direct outreach to the Islamic world.

Politically speaking, I consider myself to be what George W Bush might call a “compassionate liberterian.” Sort of Ron Paul, but believing in some sort of at least minimal safety net and accepting a role for reasonable regulation by government to maintain a fair (if not level) economic playing field. I despise — equally — borrowing to spend and borrowing to cut taxes. I think that there is more to fear from viewing the Constitution as being a “living document” than viewing it as chiseled in stone, but I think it’s important to have razor-sharp legal minds debating issues from both sides in Supreme Court deliberations. I like the current court balance of 4 to 4, with a conservative-leaning swing vote. I regularly vote for a conservative-liberterian, GOP congressman (Dana Rohrabacher).

So why did I vote for Obama? Simple. For the rest of my life, I’m basing my vote for President on the candidate who will make it less likely that a nuclear bomb will be detonated in Long Beach Harbor. What Obama has done thus far (and for which he received the Peace Prize) has convinced me that I made the correct choice.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

As well read as everyone is — you may have read this article.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/what_soros_wanted_obama_delive.html

If you haven’t, you may find the some points on Soros intersting. I believe this commentary adds a whole new dimension of possibilities behind the Obama Nobel Peace Prize Award.

Here is an excerpt:___________________________

These words were surely music to Soros’ ears as he has been a lifelong Esperantist in the footsteps of his father. Soros is one of the world’s few native Esperanto speakers and was wont to quell his youthful depression in London’s famous speaker’s corner, proclaiming the virtues of creating the Esperantist version of the tower of Babel in the modern world. For readers who might never have heard of Esperanto, it was the invention of a 19th century Jewish doctor, who dreamed of a world free of nationality. He invented a trans-European language to push the ideology and Soros’ father, Tivadar was one of its leading proponents.

No American president thus far has professed more affinity for this absurd goal than Barack Obama. And he even has the preemptively awarded Nobel Peace Prize to prove it. Whether George Soros had anything to do with the award, we might never know, but it seems mighty darned fishy and definitely in keeping with both Soros’ international influence and his aim of “reorienting America in the world.”
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Thanks Sarge. Lucky Dog, you live 88 miles away from Seattle! I am right in the heart of King County and sometimes I wonder what depresses me more…the insistent rain or the irritating/condescending liberals.

But we both live in a state that elects Gregoire as Governor for 2 terms and keeps electing Patty Murray to be one of our Senators. I keep joking with a lot of my liberal friends that when Senator Murray enters a bathroom and shuts the door behind her, she is still not the most intelligent being in the room. The tub, the basin, the toilet, the medicine closet and trash can are way more giften than her.