In 2003, Texas was suffering from an epidemic of health care lawsuit abuse. This, in turn, created a serious crisis in patients’ access to care. Medical specialists were significantly limiting their practices, leaving the state, or taking early retirement. Huge swaths of Texas lacked obstetricians willing to deliver babies or neurosurgeons willing to take trauma cases.

In response, the Texas Legislature passed a strong medical liability reform law. The centerpiece of that law is a $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages that may be rendered against physicians or hospitals; the total cap – per plaintiff, per incident – is $750,000.

Texas voters then approved Proposition 12, a constitutional amendment that ratified the legislature’s authority to impose these most important reforms.

By all measures, the reforms have worked exactly as promised. Patients have better access to needed and timely care. More physicians provide specialty and high-risk obstetrical care in both urban and rural areas. Physicians enjoy lower premiums and a more competitive liability insurance market. Consider these facts:

• Texas has gained more than 14,000 new physicians to take care of Texas patients. Many of these physicians practice high-risk specialties such as emergency medicine, neurosurgery, pediatric intensive care, and pediatric infectious disease medicine. Patients now can get more timely and convenient care when needed.
• Twenty-one rural Texas counties have added at least one obstetrician since the passage of Proposition 12, including 12 counties that previously had none.
• The emergency care provisions have saved lives by helping ensure Texas patients have access to critical and timely care. The threat of lawsuit frenzy could harm Texas’ emergency room care.

The 2003 liability reforms have worked. They’ve lived up to their promise. Sick and injured Texans now have more physicians who are more willing and able to give them the medical care they need.

Steve Levine
VP, Communication
Texas Medical Association

If there’s a real problem with a doctor/hospital it can still be addressed in the courts – even after tort reform.

Tort reform in Texas only limits the “punishment” award, not the “harm” award. That can still be very high. Prior to tort reform the total award had to be high for patients to get much of anything. Harm is limited by economic determinations, but punitive can be unlimited. So juries pile on the punitive part for the wrong reasons. 15% of a large number is much less.

To focus on only one town is disingenuous. By contrast, liability savings have funded a charity clinic in Corpus Christi, And as a Texas doctor, I have seen malpractice premiums fall by 20-50% (depending on specialty) since reform was enacted.

And I disagree with Baker that defensive medicine is not a significant amount. We can argue about what’s a “good study”, but there are studies, and their estimates average out to be about $100B a year.

So, it only saves 1.5% of healthcare costs? No biggie, right? What was that healthcare cost number again? Astronomical number accounting for 1/6 of the US GDP. Isn’t saving 1.5% of that worthy?

Give me 1 reason why we wouldn’t want to include something that saved 1.5% of a very, very, very large number. Just 1.

Dr. Phillips
Bloomington, IL

When Republicans then mention what their ideas reform are, liberals blithely say, “Won’t work” and become themselves “the party of no.”

Does their self-contradiction ever occur to them?