Patients' Bill of Goods.(Brief Article)

The proposed "Patients' Bill of Rights" has nothing remotely to do with extending basic traditional rights of citizenship to Americans or with providing protections against medical rationing to patients. It has much to do with providing a financial bonanza for the denizens of the sue-for-profit litigation industry, creating chaos in medical care, and paving the way for the government to come back to "solve" anew the resurgent problems of "spiraling health care costs" and the "growing number of the uninsured" that will result.

It is not well understood that the much-maligned health maintenance organizations (HMOs) are not the product of the free market, but rather the deliberate creation of collectivist academics and statist politicians. It was Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who has been for years a champion of socialized medicine, and self-described "Keynesian" socialist Richard Nixon, who hatched the HMO Act of 1973 in Washington, supposedly to control mounting health care costs.

The road to the problem of rising health care costs was paved on Capitol Hill during World War II with the imposition of wage and price controls, which triggered the development of employer-provided health insurance. To bypass the problems of a limited workforce, employers began to offer health insurance to attract new workers. Health insurance became tied to place of employment. With insurance paying medical bills, the perception of workers was that they were spending someone else's money, and they began to spend health care dollars without the constraints prudent consumers normally use when they spend money in the marketplace. The problem was then acutely exacerbated when government plunged head-on into the health care field with the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s.

Now, some of these politicians - who have supported collectivism in medicine all along - want to turn over the regulatory machine and the writing of more mandates to non-elected bureaucrats, and the legal process of conflict resolution to their friends, the trial lawyers. No wonder the Patients' Bill of Rights has been dubbed "a lawyers' bill of delights"! Both the Senate and House versions of the bill considered the sky as the limit for malpractice damages. The original House version, for example, would have capped non-economic and punitive damages at $5 million each. At the last minute, President George W. Bush and Representative Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.), the original sponsor of the House bill, reached a compromise cap at $1.5 million each, essentially tripling the White House's original proposal of $500,000. President Bush and his allies were able to ...