Obama Effectively Walks Away From Meaningful Tort Reform

In an interview with Steve Croft this evening, Obama said the following about tort reform:

KROFT: If it came down to getting this plan passed, would you be willing to do more in the area of tort reform and malpractice insurance? Would you be willing to agree to caps, for example, on malpractice judgments?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: What I would be willing to do is to consider any ideas out there that would actually work in terms of reducing costs, improving the quality of patient care. So far the evidence I've seen is that caps will not do that.

Obama missed the evidence cited by Governor Palin in a recent Facebook note:

Many states, including my own state of Alaska, have enacted caps on lawsuit awards against health care providers. Texas enacted caps and found that one county’s medical malpractice claims dropped 41 percent, and another study found a “55 percent decline” after reform measures were passed....Limiting lawyer contingency fees, as is done under the Federal Tort Claims Act, is another step. The State of Alaska pioneered the “loser pays” rule in the United States, which deters frivolous civil law suits by making the loser partially pay the winner’s legal bills. Preventing quack doctors from giving “expert” testimony in court against real doctors is another reform. Texas Gov. Rick Perry noted that, after his state enacted tort reform measures, the number of doctors applying to practice medicine in Texas “skyrocketed by 57 percent” and that the tort reforms “brought critical specialties to underserved areas.” These are real reforms that actually improve access to health care....Dr. Weinstein’s research shows that around $200 billion per year could be saved with legal reform.

As is usually the case with his interviews, Obama has given Republicans and conservatives a gift. This statement shows that his loyalty lies with trial lawyers and comes just days after Obama claimed in his address to a joint session of Congress that he'd be open to inserting meaningful tort reform measures into a prospective healthcare bill. Howard Dean already let the cat out of the bag at a recent townhall when he admitted that "[t]he reason that tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on."

Polling indicates that a plurality of Americans support the idea advocated by Governor Palin and other conservatives and currently opposed by Obama and most of the Democrat Party. Republicans and conservatives should take a stand in support of honest doctors and make it clear that that there "can be no true healthcare reform without legal reform."

This interview also revealed that Obama remains angry that the idea of "death panels" has been introduced into the debate:

The notion that we've got death panels that would pull the plug on grandma. As I said before, that's a simple lie.

Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't Obama now explicitly used the phrase "death panels" more than Governor Palin? Nearly half the country believes Obama is lying. Perhaps this strategy of calling political adversaries liars without addressing their arguments is a strategy that should be placed on its death panel.

Update: The most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that "placing new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits finds significant public backing: Nearly two-thirds support caps on the amount of money that can be collected as a result of medical errors, with support increasing since June." We'll talk more about this poll tomorrow as some of the data is devastating for Obamacare when considering that the sample is comprised of 21% Republicans and 24% liberals.