Sure the judicial review process catches some of the frivolous lawsuits, but plenty of them slip by, and then the decision is left to a jury. Juries have shown a tendency to award huge sums of money for pain and suffering in these cases. And those are just the cases that actually go before the court. For every case that actually goes to court, how many do you think are settled before they ever get to that point?

Of course there has to be some system out there to make sure that doctors are doing their jobs properly, but that system already is in place. There are medical review boards, and a doctor that has been shown to be incompetent will not be permitted to continue practicing medicine. That is the theory at least, in practice that is not how it usually works. More often than not all but the most serious of transgressions are swept under the rug and never really dealt with. If there is reform to malpractice and tort law, there needs to be reform to disciplinary proceedings against doctors to go along with it.

If the cost of insurance is controlled, and the amount of money spent on settlements is reduced, the cost of health care can be reduced as well. The goal of tort should be to make the other party whole again, not to make the person suing another party rich. As it stands right now, it becomes a question of how much money can I make off of this mistake, rather than what will put me back to where I was before. I'm not saying that these are the only steps that should be taken to fix the problems in the health care industry, but they are the most obvious to me.

Tort reform isn't the only thing that drives health care costs...not by a long shot. But the prohibitive cost of malpractice insurance, and other forms of tort definitely help to drive the cost of health care. Perhaps I overstated my case when I said that reform will dramatically reduce health care costs, but no matter how you look at it, it would help to reduce costs for health care providers, which in turn will help reduce costs to patients.

Hospitals and health care providers need some help as well, that much is obvious. I mean many hospitals rely on donations just to stay open and to purchase the newest and best equipment that is available. Hospitals are going broke even with the amount of money they charge for care, and people are going broke trying to pay for health care....somewhere something is obviously very broken within our health care system. My statement was not meant to be an all inclusive method of fixing all the problems, it was more me identifying what I see to be a couple of the biggest problems out there.

There are fundamental flaws within our health care system, and it needs some serious reforms to become a system that works. What I personally would like to see from the government is for them to take their time on these reforms. They aren't going to cure the system's ills overnight, and a measured approach that researches the problems and actually works to cure them is what I'd like to see, rather than us applying a band-aid and then in 25 years having to apply another band-aid. I would be hard pressed to believe that a bill that has been worked on for a couple of months is going to fix a system that has been broken for decades.