Republicans seem to regard the health care reform debate as an opportunity to keep flogging their tort reform horse. They, of course, regard the health care reform bill, HR 3962, as being a hostage of the (cue the scary music) trial lawyers (kill the scary music). That is hardly news. But here are a few little details that may just drive home the point...
At 10:28 PM Saturday, after hours of debate on the health care bill, after the Stupak Amendment had passed, and just before a final vote was to be taken, Eric Cantor filed a Motion to Recommit with instructions to report the bill back to the House with amendments that were supposed to address tort reform and concerns of senior citizens. A motion to recommit with instructions is a fairly standard parliamentary maneuver; when used in good faith, it is intended to say, "Whoa! In the process of having this debate, we have realized that there are some things that we think the Committee needs to work out before the bill comes to a vote on the floor. Let's send it back to the Committee so that they can work out these complex issues that have just been revealed." It makes no sense at all to propose that the bill be recommitted with instructions to report out already specified amendments, because the premise of recommittal, when undertaken in good faith, is that the issues are sufficiently complex that merely offering an amendment on the floor would not be good enough. Of course, the problem is that amendments are supposed to be prefiled, and if they have not been prefiled, they can't be considered without additional parliamentary hurdles. And Cantor wanted to keep something back, so that he could, at the last minute, force yet another vote that he hoped would be uncomfortable for the Democrats. His hope here was that he could do one of two things -- by forcing votes on issues that he thought would be uncomfortable for Democrats, he might cause a few of them to back away from the bill, or at least he could get recorded votes that might show up in campaign commercials next year.
So just as the vote on HR 3962 was about to be taken, Eric Cantor made his motion. See the Congressional Record cite here.
His motion asked that the bill be sent back to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce with instructions that they report the bill back with these amendments:
1. Provide $54 billion over the next 10 years to increase funding for Medicare reimbursements.
2. Make federal the system of medical malpractice laws applicable in each of the states. Aside from the philosophical principle of federalism that would be completely trashed by this bill, it would limit the recovery by plaintiffs and it would cut back on attorney's fees payable to plaintiffs' lawyers (though not to defense lawyers!), and would have made a series of other fairly esoteric changes to legal doctrines like the collateral source rule.
Pairing those two changes, Cantor argued that the Democrats who might oppose the bill were putting their trial lawyer buddies ahead of the interests of the elderly. In other words, he painted the Democrats' view as being that the ambulance chasers gets paid, but Grandma is going to die when she can't find a doctor who will take Medicare patients.
With that little bit of background, let's look at what happened when Democratic Representative Bruce Braley from Iowa responded. Here's the YouTube video. The speaker (a male, not Nancy Pelosi) had to tell the Republicans to sit down and shut up, and to stop their catcalls when Braley tried to talk about the 98,000 or more Americans who die every year from preventable medical negligence (the figure is from the widely respected Institute of Medicine, a project of the National Academy of Sciences -- see the 1999 report To Err is Human).
The motion to recommit failed, but the Republicans went on to turn it into a fundraising campaign. From a letter that Pete Sessions, Republican Representative from Texas, sent to various fundraising targets:
Pelosi even tapped Rep. Bruce Braley, a former trial lawyer who made a living from frivolous law suits, as the Democrat to voice opposition to tort reform.
This offended Northern Virginia trial lawyer Robert T. Hall. When I first met Bob 30 years ago, he was a Republican. But since the Republican Party decided that trial lawyers would be their primary target, no more. Here is Bob's letter in response:
Dear Mr. Sessions:
Congressman Bruce Braley from Iowa took to the floor of the House to ask the Republican members of the House why they showed no interest in the 98,000 people who die each year from medical malpractice, or the $17 billion to $28 billion spent annually to treat those injured by medical neglect. His source - the Institute of Medicine - is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Of course he got no answer from your assembled colleagues, who tried to shout him down for raising the subject.
Today in a fund raising letter to the faithful you described Congressman Braley's appearance as follows:
Pelosi even tapped Rep. Bruce Braley, a former trial lawyer who made a living from frivolous law suits, as the Democrat to voice opposition to tort reform.
I'll make you a deal. If you can find ANY lawyer in the entire United States of America who makes a living from frivolous lawsuits I will write my personal check for $10,000 to the RNCC - no questions asked. Do we have a deal? All I want in return is this: when you fail to come up with such a lawyer, as you surely will, you'll apologize to the families of those 98,000 who die unnecessarily and avoidably each year, and the hundreds of thousands of others victimized by negligent doctors for calling their claims frivolous. Fair enough - $10,000 or an apology?
Sincerely,
Robert T. Hall
I'll be looking forward to Sessions' response.
But more importantly, Braley is trying to focus attention on how we can hold down the costs of medical malpractice. The IOM report is clear -- preventable medical errors cost lives and money. Even in 1999 dollars, the annual cost from preventable medical errors was put at between $17 and $29 billion dollars. Take that forward into 2009 dollars, and extend it to 10 years, and if we could end preventable medical adverse results we could knock $500 billion off the health care bill over the next 10 years.
The IOM report contains a number of specific recommendations. One that seems like it should be a no-brainer is the promulgation of standards of practice. When anesthesiologists got together about 20 years ago to try to figure out how to reduce "adverse results," they pinpointed one problem in particular -- that anesthesiologists sometimes made a mistake and turned off the oxygen rather than turning off the anesthetic, causing brain damage and, if undiscovered for a few minutes, death. Anesthesiologists decided that the answer was to install in every operating room a piece of equipment that made that mistake virtually impossible. The number of adverse results dropped by a factor of 40. The number of malpractice claims dropped by a similar amount.
So why would Republicans not want to talk about it? Damned if I know.
Blue Commonwealth is a community forum for the discussion of political issues of interest to Virginians.
The opinions expressed by users of this website do not necessarily reflect the views of Blue Commonwealth or its editors.
