wrote in message
...
On Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:39:05 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

I mean $100,000 in malpractice insurance per doctor, god only knows
how much for a hospital, a medical equipment company or a drug company
and you can't say it is an insignificant part of medical cost.

Actually, I can...

"But even large savings in premiums can have only a small direct impact on
health care spending--private or governmental--because malpractice costs
account for less than 2 percent of that spending."

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=4968&type=0

That is a 8 year old chart with a trend going almost straight up. Do
you have one from this decade?

Bear in mind "congress" is mostly lawyers so I am skeptical about how
they slice these numbers. I can find you a lot of articles from the
medical side that say torts are a huge problem.

2004 - http://www.factcheck.org/article133.html
2006 - http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/71xx/doc7...alpractice.pdf
2008 -
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?...entID=2 54574
2010 (June) - http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/fall04/w10709.html

Feel free to dispute these at your leisure..