http://sufficientscruples.com/blog/2006/05/12/tort-reform-what-exactly-do-they-want/ Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues. Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:53:59 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://sufficientscruples.com/blog/2006/05/12/tort-reform-what-exactly-do-they-want/comment-page-1/#comment-9303 Sufficient Scruples » Blog Archive » Malpractice Law and “Tort Reform”: How Bad? Why Change? Wed, 07 Jun 2006 02:19:31 +0000 http://sufficientscruples.com/blog/archives/287#comment-9303 [...] At any rate, what impresses me about Martin’s post is that, even while seemingly critical of the tort system, he manages to identify the correct decision-making criteria: the sensitivity and specificity of malpractice trials (i.e., the likelihood of “true positives” - correct awards for well-grounded accusations of malpractice - and the likelihood of “true negatives” - correct rejections of false malpractice claims - respectively) as means of adjudicating claims of wrongdoing. As with any test or evaluative procedure, there will be a certain percentage of Type I (false positive) and Type II (false negative) errors. The question is not whether malpractice trials are a perfect way of adjudicating accusations, but whether they are better than any available alternative. (A recent study, often cited in support of the call for “tort reform”, actually suggests that the sensitivity of malpractice trials is quite high.) There is also the question whether whatever level of benefits (if any) we might derive from abandoning or changing the tort system is worth eviscerating the Constitutional role of civil trials in settling disputes of this type. [...] [...] At any rate, what impresses me about Martin’s post is that, even while seemingly critical of the tort system, he manages to identify the correct decision-making criteria: the sensitivity and specificity of malpractice trials (i.e., the likelihood of “true positives” – correct awards for well-grounded accusations of malpractice – and the likelihood of “true negatives” – correct rejections of false malpractice claims – respectively) as means of adjudicating claims of wrongdoing. As with any test or evaluative procedure, there will be a certain percentage of Type I (false positive) and Type II (false negative) errors. The question is not whether malpractice trials are a perfect way of adjudicating accusations, but whether they are better than any available alternative. (A recent study, often cited in support of the call for “tort reform”, actually suggests that the sensitivity of malpractice trials is quite high.) There is also the question whether whatever level of benefits (if any) we might derive from abandoning or changing the tort system is worth eviscerating the Constitutional role of civil trials in settling disputes of this type. [...]

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