SmallGovTimes.com

By: Edward Daley | Published on 07/21/04    

John F. Kerry is a lawyer who complains that the healthcare system is too expensive, yet his running mate, another lawyer, has made his fortune suing doctors. Malpractice lawsuits, as most people know, are one of the primary causes of increased medical costs in the U.S., yet the Kerry/Edwards solution to the problem is NOT to try and prevent lawyers from bringing frivolous lawsuits against physicians who've done nothing wrong. Surprise - surprise! Nor is their plan to limit the amount of damages that plaintiffs with legitimate cases can get... like say... something approaching a reasonable amount of money.

No, their idea for fixing the problem is to give the federal government more control over the entire healthcare system. At this point I should probably explain that roughly 35% of the U.S. Congress is made up of lawyers and, at least on the left hand side of the aisle, it is heavily funded by them. Half of the members of the Bush cabinet are lawyers too, and I suspect that in years past that percentage has been even higher. The judiciary, of course, is nothing BUT lawyers who've become judges, so when you think about it, lawyers make up a big part of the government.

When Bill Clinton was in office one could have argued, since he was a lawyer as well, that the majority of policies created by our government were devised by lawyers. For all anyone knows, that may still be the case. After all, even though Bush is not a lawyer himself, there is no doubt that he depends on the opinions of lawyers whenever he attempts to present a bill to Congress or formulate a new administrative policy. And even if that were not true, lawyers would still be an incredibly powerful force in our government as a whole. If Senator Kerry is elected president this November, lawyers will exert even more influence over our everyday lives, and that is something I find to be more than a little troubling.

Why? Well, look at it this way: in the world outside of politics, lawyers make up about one third of one percent of America's population. This is a tiny percentage, especially when compared to the number of lawyers who are currently holding elective offices in our government, per capita. Yet, in spite of that fact, the direct costs of civil litigation in this country run to the tens of billions of dollars every year. That doesn't even include the indirect costs, which are ten times higher than that. That's a tremendous amount of green-backs, and who gets as much as forty percent (and sometimes even more) of all the money awarded by courts in the U.S., as well as the cash that changes hands due to out-of-court settlements? Take a wild guess.

Now don't go jumping to any conclusions here. It's not like I'm against people earning a good living, or even becoming rich. If you're capable of doing so, more power to you. I'm also not complaining about people who sue because they've been wronged in some way. If you have been wronged by someone, you should sue them for just compensation. That's the American way. I'm simply pointing out that when a group composed of less than a million people shares a monetary pie worth hundreds of billions of dollars (that averages out to hundreds of thousands of dollars per lawyer annually) the odds that a majority of them, or even a sizable minority, will ever decide to reduce the size of that pie are negligible.

Which brings me back to the main point of this article. People like the two Johns, currently running for the highest offices in the land, have no intention of ever producing policies which might cut into the cash-flow of their fellow lawyers, or upset all the other politicos who owe their positions to lawyers. In fact, they want to take control of the medical profession, because they know that if the government runs it, lawyers will inevitably decide who gets most of the money produced by that industry. And no, it won't be the doctors who actually earned the money.

No lawyer, and indeed, no politician who is backed by lawyers has anything to gain by allowing the CASH COW that is the medical profession to remain subject to the normal market forces that rule most other aspects of the business world, not when they can take control of it. Furthermore, people like John Edwards will never support any sort of reforms which might make it more difficult for people to file frivolous malpractice lawsuits against physicians. Now that lawyers can manipulate the system to the point at which they are able to detrimentally effect the costs of patients' medical treatment, they'll keep hammering away until they convince the majority of people that politicians are the solution to the problem of skyrocketing medical costs.

They create the problem, and then they waltz in and wave the magic wand of governmental intervention in our hapless faces, because they understand that we just want the cost of our healthcare to go down. They also know that, after a while, we'll fall for even the most amateurish sleight of hand deception, if it means we get to pay less at the doctor's office. People will, over time, allow themselves to be manipulated into accepting just about anything if it means they get to have what they think they want... you can count on it.

You can also count on a general degradation in quality within the medical profession if the government takes complete control of it. It's easy enough to understand why that would be the case if you consider that competition will no longer be a part of the equation, because lawyers and politicians will decide which doctor you get to see and what those doctors will be allowed to do for you. Competition is what makes people strive to be the best. The best doctors, like the best football players and the best musicians, are rewarded with more money and prestige for their exceptional efforts. Take away competition and even good physicians will work less hard to help you with whatever your problem is, because their incentive for being the best at what they do will be gone.

Think about it, would you work any harder than you had to if you knew you wouldn't be treated any better than the biggest slacker in the place regardless of what you did? Of course not, and neither will your doctor if people like John Kerry and John Edwards get their way.

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