Regarding Health Care Costs, What is Wrong With Making the Loser Pay?

Billions of dollars are spent defending frivolous malpractice lawsuits, settlements and defensive medicine.It has been said that one way to fairly contain medical costs is to "make the loser pay', or should everyone who wants to sue the doctor be entitled to hit the jackpot?

acermill
We can eliminate that situation by eliminating the right to lawsuit for any medical services provided.Check around to see how popular THAT is, and then get back to us.

Steve D
"Loser pay" rules would certainly cut down on frivolous law suits (hopefully come close to eliminate them), however, it can also harm those who have been legitimately injured of they cannot take the chance that they will lose in front of a jury. Obviously, any system would have to balance the need to eliminate frivolous law suits with the rights of people for justice.

I myself prefer a more drastic measure - courts should rule on the validity of a law suit - any lawyer bringing three or more frivolous lawsuits in his practicing career would be de-barred from life and not allowed to practice within the US. Any person bringing three frivolous law suits would lose the ability to use the court system to sue someone for 10 years.

Peiling
I totally agree that part of the increase in healthcare cost is due to defensive medicine and malpractice insurance which are I heard astronomical.Anyway, one solution is have the judges be a system of selecting a penel of third party jury who are not average joe who knwos nothing about medicine and would be more sympathetic to a sob story and rule favoring the "victim".They need to have a penel of medical experts, who has authority in medicine, and knowledge of procedures proformed in relations to the malpractice suit and judge is the doctor who was sued did the best he could under the circumstances.If you put a bunch of people you pull out of a hat on the jury, what do they know about medicine or even what was exactly done?This is why almost all malpractice suits are like jackpots and thus increase the number of suits since everyone thinks it's free money and they got nothign to lose.
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