Obama moves to Speed up Medical Malpractice Tort Reform.

On Wednesday doctors around the country got a stinging surprise when a health care reform bill unveiled by Max Baucus revealed little in way of provision for medical malpractice tort reform or for increased Medicare reimbursements, two things that President Obama has been wooing their strong support with for months. In response the President has now moved to accelerate a proposed $25 million program designed to ease the pain of medical malpractice lawsuits.

From the beginning President Obama has been acutely aware of how much support from doctors would help him in his attempt to finally pass a healthcare reform bill. When President Bill Clinton tried in 1992 the AMA, the most powerful doctor’s association in the country launched a $4.5 advertising campaign against his proposals stating that “national health insurance would lead to a federal takeover of healthcare “Sound familiar?

Until the Baucus bill was revealed Obama had been doing a good job with the doctors’ associations. Indeed the AMA endorsed House legislation that included Obama’s plan to increase physician Medicare reimbursement by $230 billion in the next ten years. Their anger at the Baucus proposal now has the President and his administration rushing to try and woo back that hard won confidence.

The malpractice plan in question is a grant of up to $3 million to every state to test new approaches to medical liability. Officials are to conduct a “review of what works” to both improve patient safety and reduce the need for physicians to practice “defensive medicine” for fear of being hit by a crippling lawsuit.

Trial lawyers and doctors have been at odds for decades over the issue off medical malpractice. They vehemently disagree over both how genuinely affected patients should be compensated for their injuries and over how true it really is that a fear of lawsuits causes doctors to order additional testing that may not really be necessary. This practice of “defensive medicine” is estimated to be in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars. Doctor’s associations’ insist that if the medical malpractice tort system were reined in somehow, perhaps the doctors have always argued by capping the dollar amount that can be awarded in such cases, the practice would decrease significantly.

Obama has in the past sided with the trail lawyers who oppose such caps, and he first made public mention of the review project in his speech to a joint session of Congress last week. "I don't believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet," he said at the time, "but I've talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs."

But will the grants, even if they are speedily administered as Obama suggested they would be on Thursday be seen as too little too late to maintain the doctor’s support? According to Peter Levine, who is the president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia the President’s plan is “just smoke and mirrors” to deflect attention from the snubs of the Baucus plan.