McCaskill: Tort Reform "hasn't worked to bring down health care costs."

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/11726

On Tuesday, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill held a town hall meeting where she discussed health care reform. One audience member asked how McCaskill felt about tort reform as an answer for bringing down health care costs due to malpractice suits. The Senator responded that in states like California and Florida where there has been “aggressive” tort reform health care costs haven’t gone down, but have instead gone up.

: In Florida their health care costs have risen faster than almost any place else in the country even with tort reform. So, I think it is being sold by someone out there as a cure all, but where it hasn't worked to bring down health care costs.

McCaskill was also asked why employers wouldn’t simply dump employer owned health insurance under health care reform. She said it is already happening without government sponsored health care, but under the reform proposals Congress is seeking to offer incentives or exemptions for small businesses, but ask for help paying for health care from large companies that do drop employees:

: If they decide it's okay to dump people off and force...right now all of us pay for their insurance, we all pay for their medical care. it's not like they aren't getting medical care, we're all paying for it. We'll probably ask them to pay for a portion of it.

[RDANGELO]

1. Another right wing magic policy debunked.

They are always coming up with simple policies to complicated problems that are supposed to fix everything.

.Massive tax cuts especially for the rich Will fix everything in the economy.

.Invading Iraq will solve all our problems in the Middle East.

The current one is that competition can solve all of our health care problems. I'm sure that some of you could come up with other examples.