{"id":217316,"date":"2010-01-11T13:28:21","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T18:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.cjac.org,2010:\/\/1.1018"},"modified":"2010-01-21T13:32:53","modified_gmt":"2010-01-21T18:32:53","slug":"congressional-budget-office%e2%80%99s-report-said-reforms-implemented-nationwide-would-reduce-deficit-by-billions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/217316","title":{"rendered":"Congressional Budget Office\u2019s Report Said Reforms Implemented Nationwide Would Reduce Deficit by Billions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Letters to the Editor Column <\/h3>\n

Jeffrey Lowe’s column, “Tort Reform ‘Savings’ Ring Hallow” (Dec. 30, 2009) on tort reform and the federal health care proposal was remarkable — for what it left out. <\/p>\n

He failed to mention the report<\/a> issued only last October by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which concluded that reforms including already-tested limits on malpractice jury awards, a statute of limitations on malpractice claims, and replacing joint-and-several liability with a fair-share rule, if implemented nationwide, could reduce total federal budget deficits by $54 billion over 10 years. <\/p>\n

Mr. Lowe must have been aware of the Congressional Budget Office, because he cites the office’s five-year-old report on medical malpractice costs. He raises that report’s estimate of a 2 percent cost saving, which he dismisses as representing “only” $3.6 billion out of $2.3 trillion in total health care spending. <\/p>\n

Even allowing for a portion of these legal-related totals going to legitimate compensation for patients, the billions still going into wasteful litigation and defensive medicine would buy, for example, a huge number of vaccines and medicines for our children for many years to come. <\/p>\n

John H. Sullivan
\nPresident, Civil Justice Assoc. of California <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Letters to the Editor Column Jeffrey Lowe’s column, “Tort Reform ‘Savings’ Ring Hallow” (Dec. 30, 2009) on tort reform and the federal health care proposal was remarkable — for what it left out. He failed to mention the report issued only last October by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which concluded that reforms including already-tested […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}