Warren Buffett says health care costs are a bigger problem than corporate taxes

Re:Warren Buffett says health care costs are a bigger proble... by TheCoelacanth on Tuesday May 09, 2017 @12:03PM (#14301142)

> From what I can tell, 10% of every dollar spent on health care in the US goes towards malpractice insurance for doctors. A system that acknowledges that well-meaning doctors can make mistakes and shouldn't be unduly punished could cost almost that 10% less.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't pay for the damage caused by doctor's mistakes, you are just offloading part of the cost of your healthcare system onto a few unlucky people. If you do pay for it but it's not paid for by the doctors, you just re-invented malpractice insurance but with a different source of funding.

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Re:Warren Buffett says health care costs are a bigger proble... by curun1r on Tuesday May 09, 2017 @12:23PM (#14301333)

Ahh...but what percent of malpractice payments are consumed by legal fees? Enough for many, many free lunches.

Also, if health care coverage were universal, we wouldn't need big medical settlements to cover future medical costs since those costs would already be covered.

But mistakes happen. How you deal with those mistakes is an ideological question. Do patients who suffer from those mistakes deserve large settlements to the detriment of the vastly larger amount of patients that receive quality care? The US system believes that while other countries choose to lower costs at the expense of those unlucky few.

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