A couple of days ago I was listening to someone from the Bush campaign talk about how tort reform was going to help the cost of health care. He said that by limiting pain and suffering claims to $250,000 doctors and hospitals would pay less malpractice insurance and the cost of health care would go down.

Bullshit...

This sort of reasoning assumes that insurance companies will decrease their rates to pass the savings on to their customers. This also assumes that once the doctors or hospitals are paying less in insurance that they will decrease their fees or do other things such as stop running tests that aren't necessary. After this chain of events, the HMO's and PPO's will immediately pass this savings on to us the consumer, and our employers will in turn reduce the amount of employee contributions.

I think I will say it one more time, in order to punctuate the utter stupidity here:

Bullshit...

(sorry if you are offended, I just think nothing describes this kind of stupidity better)

Either they assume we are incredibly stupid, or they are. I think it's both. People are greedy, and they will not lower their prices unless competition is really fierce. I do think that the other part of the Bush plan for starting health care savings plan sounds like a more reasonable step in the right direction.

Check out my plan for universal health care:

Health Care for All and Higher Minimum Wages

Even though I am still voting for Bush(reluctantly), its these sort of half-ass attempts at helping the poor that really alienate the rest of the voters. Labeling tort reform that benefits the health care industry, and then say you are helping the working poor is incredibly insulting.

-AC